Spoiling the message.

The Kerala Story is a recently released film in Hindi which tracks three women who were converted to Islam through 'love Jihad' and forced to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). wikipedia. The film apparently claims that at least 32,000 women in Kerala were similarly converted to Islam and forced to join ISIS. "The Kerala story is doing well at the box office and has managed to cross the Rs 60 crore (Rs 600 million or around $7.3 million) mark." India Today. "According to the US state department's Country Reports on Terrorism 2020 there were '66 known Indian-origin fighters affiliated' with the IS as of November 2020. In September 2021, India's National Investigation Agency said that it had arrested 168 people in connection with 37 cases of 'terror attacks, conspiracy and funding' inspired by the IS's ideology." BBC. "The central issue of the movie, the Kerala Story, is religious conversion of Hindus and Christians to Islam," and "The core content of the movie has a kernel of truth and is not being disputed. There is no accusation of peddling falsehood," wrote Ibn Khaldun Bharati. "There is no denying the fact that conversions happened in Kerala - of girls too!" "Women were not recruited in these missions for combat roles. Jihadi men needed comfort girls, and these women were jihad-prostitutes." "In India, the issue of conversion will remain contentious because, historically it has been a corollary of conquest," and "every such conversion makes the Hindu seethe at the unending series of defeat and humiliation." In 2022, another movie in Hindi, The Kashmir Files, sought to tell the story of the ethnic cleansing of Hindus by Muslim mobs from Indian administered Kashmir. wikipedia. It was submitted to the International Film Festival of India, but was dismissed as a "vulgar, propaganda" movie by the head of the Jury Nadav Lapid. DH. "Form is content, and content is form when it comes to the arts," wrote Lapid. "In the film, the bad guys get portrayed in a typically bad way. They are not human beings but a caricature of bad people." "I say that if you are making such a propaganda movie, at least do it with elegance." Conversions and attacks on Hindus are real. Making them caricatures makes a mockery of their suffering. The irony is that the Christian Church in Kerala is also complaining of 'love jihad'. The Print. Before Christianity there was no concept of conversion and Christians came at least 500 years before Islam. In fact, the problem of Christian missionaries converting Hindus by money or coercion has been recognised since Independence. Outlook. According to Pew Research, "Overall, just 2% of respondents report a different religion than the one in which they were raised, including 0.4% who are converts to Christianity. Christian converts in India mostly are former Hindus," but "0.7% of respondents were raised Hindus and now identify as something else, while 0.8% were raised as something else but now identify as Hindu." There is no doubt that Hindus are denigrated as "heathens" by Christians and "kafir" by Muslims, to be converted or killed by a "True Believer" so that the souls can go to their versions of paradise. However, crass propaganda films to help one political party does not serve the cause of us Hindus. Politics destroys the message.