The Economist: Is Narendra Modi turning Bollywood against Muslims?

The Economist has published an article arguing that India’s prime minister champions a low-budget, anti-Muslim film. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Bollywood has for the most part kept free of India’s scourge of Hindi-Muslim conflict. With its liberal values, Muslim stars and celebrity Hindu-Muslim marriages, the Hindi film industry has in some ways been a powerful antidote to it.

A heavily politicised row over a low-budget and allegedly Islamophobic film called “The Kerala Story”, which was released this month, suggests that record of tolerance is in jeopardy. The controversy has sparked communal clashes, at least one death and over 100 arrests in the western state of Maharashtra.

It began even before the recent release of the film, which is about a fictitious Hindu woman who converted to Islam and was then radicalised. A marketing trailer for the film claimed that 32,000 girls from the southern state of Kerala had been forcibly converted to Islam then joined jihadist groups in Syria and Yemen.

This was a gross exaggeration. In 2016, around 20 young men and women left Kerala, a prosperous southern state known for its high education levels, to join Islamic State, an international jihadist group. But that did not deter Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from enthusiastically championing the film. While campaigning for Karnataka’s recent election, India’s prime minister claimed it had exposed “a new form of terrorism”.

Two big BJP-run states, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, announced tax breaks for the film. The BJP chief minister of Assam wrote in a tweet that: “Everyone should see this film with their daughters”. Opposition leaders meanwhile condemned it.

The communist chief minister of Kerala dubbed the film a product of the “Sangh Parivar”, a group of right-wing Hindu organisations. In Tamil Nadu, cinemas pulled it. West Bengal banned it, though the ban was later overturned by India’s Supreme Court.

“The Kerala Story” exploits the real-life radicalisation of a handful of Keralite Muslims to propagate a right-wing Hindu conspiracy theory known as “love jihad”, in which virile Muslim men prey upon innocent young non-Muslim women. Such Hindu conspiracies, whipped up by BJP politicians, have led to an uptick in attacks on non-Hindus, as reported this month in America’s State Department’s latest annual report on religious freedom. “Attacks on members of religious minority communities, including killings, assaults, and intimidation, occurred throughout the year.”

Another divisive Hindi film, “The Kashmir Files”, a pro-Hindu account of Kashmir’s ongoing tragedy that was released last year, allegedly incited some of that violence. It, too, was heavily touted by Mr Modi and his party. “The Kerala Story”, now playing in almost 1,500 cinemas in India and more abroad, therefore represents a worrying trend: a growing collaboration between Mr Modi’s chauvinist politics and Indian popular culture.