Selling Suspicion: The Kerala Story and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Propaganda in Cinema
- Karvaan Spotlight Desk
- Feb 26
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
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The Lead: A Judicial Pause, Not a Ban
The Kerala Story and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Propaganda
On 26 February 2026, the Kerala High Court halted the theatrical release of The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond, just one day before its scheduled nationwide premiere. Advance bookings had already opened across major multiplex chains. Promotional interviews were dominating the airwaves, and television studios were aggressively framing the film as either a brave exposé or a dangerous communal provocation.
Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas, presiding over the single-judge bench, intervened after examining the film’s teaser, which the producers confirmed was part of the final cut cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification. The court recorded that the material carried "the prima facie potential to distort public perception and disturb communal harmony."
In open court, the judge observed that Kerala "lives in total harmony among various religions," yet the film visually and textually portrayed events as "happening all over Kerala," creating "a wrong indication" that "can even incite passion." He explicitly noted that while artistic freedom is fiercely protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, that protection does not extend to material that risks promoting communal attitudes or undermining public order.
The CBFC had granted the film a U/A certificate after directing sixteen cuts and adding an expanded disclaimer. The High Court questioned whether the board had applied its own statutory guidelines with sufficient rigor, particularly those prohibiting certification of content likely to promote communal disharmony. The film was ordered to be referred to the Revising Committee for fresh examination. Its release was restrained for fifteen days.
This was not a ban. It was a procedural pause grounded in the regulatory framework of the Cinematograph Act. Yet it marked the first judicial interruption of a major commercial release in what has become a recognizable cycle of grievance-centered cinema.
The Context
The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond, directed by Kamakhya Narayan Singh and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, builds directly on its 2023 predecessor. The core narrative remains largely unchanged: young women allegedly enter interfaith relationships that function as fronts for coercion, religious conversion, and eventual recruitment into extremist networks.
The first film was marketed around the staggering claim that 32,000 women from Kerala had been converted and recruited by ISIS-linked organizations. That figure was repeatedly challenged. Parliamentary replies, Kerala Police data, and records from the National Investigation Agency placed verified Kerala-linked ISIS travel cases in the low dozens. Between 2014 and 2016, the NIA registered 19 ISIS-related cases nationwide, with two cases involving 22 persons from Kerala who traveled to ISIS territory. Publicly available state police records consistently cited roughly 10 to 15 women from Kerala linked to confirmed recruitment networks over several years.
In later interviews, the filmmakers described the 32,000 figure as a fictionalized or symbolic representation. By then, however, the number had circulated widely in promotional material and news debates.
The sequel retained "Kerala" in its title while expanding its geographical scope. After CBFC clearance in mid-February 2026, the producers held a press conference in Delhi presenting 33 women described as survivors of forced conversion.
Contemporary reporting confirmed that none of the women were from Kerala. They came from West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Jammu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Haryana, and the NCR.
When asked about the continued use of Kerala in the title, producers responded that Kerala-specific cases had been covered in the first film and that the sequel addressed a wider national issue. Petitioners before the High Court argued that branding the sequel with Kerala’s name while showcasing no Kerala cases created a misleading association capable of damaging the state’s documented record of communal harmony. The court agreed that this discrepancy warranted closer examination.
The Collective Memory
The release of The Kashmir Files in 2022 established the commercial viability of grievance-led cinema at scale. Directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, the film depicted the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and grossed ₹340.92 crore worldwide on a production budget estimated between ₹15 and ₹25 crore. Several BJP-ruled states granted tax exemptions. Senior political leaders attended screenings and publicly endorsed the film.
The profit margin was extraordinary. After distributor and exhibitor shares, industry analysts estimated net profits well in excess of ₹200 crore. Satellite and streaming rights further expanded returns.
In February 2024, Article 370, starring Yami Gautam and produced by Aditya Dhar, dramatized the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. Produced on a reported ₹20 crore budget, it earned ₹110.57 crore worldwide. The film was publicly praised by senior government figures as presenting an accurate portrayal of national security events.
In March 2024, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, directed by and starring Randeep Hooda, earned ₹31.23 crore worldwide against a reported ₹20 crore budget. Though more modest in scale, it recovered its costs.
In December 2025, Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar, starring Ranveer Singh, shifted the threat frame outward to covert intelligence operations inside Pakistan. Produced at a reported cost exceeding ₹200 crore, it grossed between ₹1,349 and ₹1,428 crore worldwide. It became one of the highest-grossing Hindi films ever made and the highest-grossing A-certified film in Indian cinema history. Even after accounting for revenue sharing with exhibitors and distributors, profit estimates exceeded ₹900 crore.
Subsequent domestic-focused films such as The Bengal Files (2025) and Udaipur Files: Kanhaiya Lal Tailor Murder (August 2025) followed the same emotional-testimony marketing model but delivered weaker returns. The latter opened to ₹0.63 crore in its first weekend, suggesting selective audience fatigue within the sub-genre.
The broader pattern, however, remains commercially significant. Certain grievance-centered films have produced unusually high returns relative to cost.
The Economics
Mid-budget ideological dramas typically operate within production costs of ₹10 to ₹30 crore. Marketing can add ₹15 to ₹20 crore. Total exposure rarely exceeds ₹40 to ₹50 crore.
A film grossing ₹250 to ₹300 crore at the box office typically returns roughly half of that to producers after exhibitor and distributor shares. Even at conservative recovery rates, revenue can exceed ₹125 to ₹150 crore against a ₹40 crore investment.
Controversy acts as a multiplier. Instead of relying solely on paid advertising, producers benefit from hours of televised debate, political endorsements, legal petitions, and social media amplification. Each controversy sustains visibility. The commercial logic is straightforward: controlled budgets limit downside risk, while polarized engagement increases upside potential.
Comparative Snapshot
Hindi cinema in the mid-1990s and 2000s frequently portrayed insurgency and terrorism within identifiable political contexts rather than as diffuse civilizational threat. Films such as Maachis examined the psychological fallout of the 1984 anti-Sikh violence and the subsequent rise of militancy in Punjab. Roja situated militancy within the Kashmir conflict while foregrounding cross-border tensions and the emotional cost of insurgency. Bombay portrayed inter-religious love against the backdrop of the 1992–93 communal riots, framing violence as a political failure rather than an inherent civilizational rupture.
Later films such as Fanaa, Mission Kashmir, Black Friday, and A Wednesday dealt with terrorism and radicalization, yet their antagonists were usually placed within specific geopolitical or socio-political contexts. Even when narratives simplified complex histories, they rarely implied that ordinary social interaction itself was structurally conspiratorial. The threat was organized militancy, often linked to identifiable networks, state failures, or international conflict.
Since 2022, however, the narrative grammar in several high-profile releases has altered in tone and location. In The Kashmir Files, historical trauma was reframed through extended testimonial sequences that blurred the line between reconstruction and present-day grievance mobilization. The Kerala Story shifted the arena of suspicion inward, locating threat within romantic relationships, educational institutions, and ordinary community spaces. In subsequent releases, the dramatic tension increasingly emerges not from armed insurgency in distant terrain but from the alleged hidden intentions of neighbors, classmates, and intimate partners.
Identity markers function less as descriptors and more as narrative cues. Romantic intimacy becomes a recruitment mechanism. Conversion is portrayed as strategy rather than personal choice. The home, the campus, and the workplace are recoded as contested ideological terrain.
This tonal evolution signals a move from historically contextualized conflict to a broader cultural suspicion embedded in everyday life. The geography of danger contracts. The site of conflict becomes domestic.
The National Question
India’s Muslim population exceeds 200 million. Official data on radicalization cases nationwide confirms isolated networks influenced by online propaganda and specific local conditions. Across multiple years, such cases number in the low hundreds. They do not approach the scale implied in some cinematic narratives.
When multiple mainstream releases repeatedly associate specific identity markers with predatory or conspiratorial behavior, repetition shapes perception. Social psychology identifies the availability heuristic and cumulative exposure effect as mechanisms by which repeated imagery can make rare events appear common.
Between the Lines
The Delhi press conference surrounding The Kerala Story 2 preserved brand continuity while broadening market reach; retaining "Kerala" in the title sustained recall from the first film’s success, while presenting survivors from multiple states expanded the thematic scope. Trailers across this cycle share structural similarities designed to prioritize emotional engagement, utilizing extended close-ups of distressed faces, escalating orchestral scores, rapid cuts juxtaposing religious symbols with threat imagery, and dialogue structured around betrayal and awakening. Consequently, statistical proportionality receives limited space, and broader contexts of coexistence rarely appear. Instead, isolated verified incidents are scaled narratively, ensuring that omission becomes a fundamental part of the storytelling architecture.
The Global Lens
Throughout history, cinema has served as a vehicle for narrative consolidation.
During World War II, Hollywood produced over 1,000 features and shorts under coordination with the Office of War Information, including the Why We Fight series, framing Axis powers in existential terms. Nazi Germany’s Triumph of the Will in 1935 drew mass audiences to reinforce regime ideology. Soviet cinema similarly advanced state narratives through revolutionary epics.
In the United States post 9/11, American Sniper grossed 547 million dollars worldwide while critics argued it reduced complex geopolitics to a binary of hero and dehumanized adversary. China’s The Battle at Lake Changjin in 2021 earned 902 million dollars domestically, aligning historical war narratives with contemporary nationalism. Turkish and Russian productions in recent years have similarly framed internal unity against external threat.
Cinema’s persuasive power is not incidental. It shapes collective memory and signals national mood. When films repeatedly depict an internal minority as a threat, international observers may read this as reflective of broader ideological currents. Cultural export influences diplomatic perception. Soft power metrics consistently show that narrative credibility affects economic and geopolitical reputation.
Voices | The Multi-Dimensional Debate
Producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah defended the film, stating that it highlights "real stories" after undergoing certification scrutiny for "one and a half months," and emphasized that the intent was to expose wrongdoing rather than target a specific community. However, the project faced strong pushback from political and cultural figures; Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned it as communal propaganda. Similarly, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor challenged the film's underlying premise by reiterating that verified conversion cases from Kerala numbered only in the dozens, not the thousands. Adding to the criticism, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap explicitly characterized the film's trailer as propaganda.
The divergence rests on measurable evidence: documented case counts versus narrative scale.
The Regulatory Question
The High Court’s intervention also revives a structural question about film certification in India. The Cinematograph Act empowers the CBFC to examine content against specific statutory criteria, including the prohibition of material likely to endanger public order or promote communal disharmony. Certification is not merely a procedural stamp. It is a substantive regulatory determination.
When a High Court questions whether the board applied its own guidelines with sufficient rigor, it introduces judicial scrutiny into what is often treated as an administrative routine. This does not transfer creative judgment to courts. It compels institutional accountability.
If upheld, such scrutiny could recalibrate the threshold at which controversial content is examined, particularly when promotional claims and narrative framing risk public misperception. The outcome may shape how future films are marketed, certified, and litigated.
The Democratic Test
Markets reward demand. Cinema responds to sentiment. But democracies require more than commercial validation. They require proportionality, restraint, and factual grounding.
Grievance-centered cinema thrives when audiences feel unheard or historically wronged. Yet when grievance becomes a replicable template, nuance is often the first casualty. A republic’s strength lies not in suppressing speech, but in ensuring that speech does not systematically erode the civic trust on which pluralism depends.
Editor’s Lens | Karvaan India
By the Editorial Board
The Kerala High Court’s fifteen-day pause does not suppress speech. It compels regulators to apply their own guidelines. That alone is significant.
The deeper question is not whether filmmakers have the right to tell difficult stories. They do. The question is whether commercial amplification untethered from proportional evidence reshapes public perception in ways that outlast the screening window.
The financial data demonstrates that grievance-centered cinema can be highly profitable when executed within controlled budgets and amplified through controversy. Market incentives reward repetition. Investors follow precedent. Once a template proves commercially viable, replication becomes rational business strategy.
But republics are not markets alone. They are moral and constitutional communities built on fragile trust. When cinema repeatedly frames an internal minority as suspect, even implicitly, that framing can seep into civic interaction. Suspicion does not erupt overnight. It accumulates.
Journalism must therefore remain evidentiary. Verify statistics. Examine primary records. Distinguish anecdote from pattern. Assess proportionality. Emotional testimony deserves hearing. It also requires contextual grounding.
Plural societies depend on habits of coexistence formed over decades. Narrative framing can influence those habits incrementally. A courtroom pause cannot resolve ideological polarization. It can, however, insist that regulatory processes be applied with seriousness.
Whether the industry treats this moment as a temporary obstacle or as an opportunity for introspection will shape more than box office forecasts. It will shape the texture of public discourse, the credibility of cultural institutions, and the quiet assumptions citizens carry about one another long after the theatre lights dim.
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