Tag: kerala

  • After backlash, Islamophobic film ‘The Kerala Story’ changes figures from 32,000 to just three women

    After backlash, Islamophobic film ‘The Kerala Story’ changes figures from 32,000 to just three women

    Indian director Sudipto Sen’s upcoming film ‘The Kerala Story’ has attracted widespread backlash for claiming to represent the stories of 32,000 women from the state who were lured into converting to Islam by Muslim men and then taken to Afghanistan to join militant outfit Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

    The trailer for the movie debuted online on November 3 last year. It opens with the story of Fathima Ba (played by Adah Sharma), who is a Hindu Malayali nurse and claimed to be one of the 32,000 Hindu and Christian women who were abducted and sent to Afghanistan. Since then, the film has been criticized by Indian politicians such as Congress leader and Leader of Opposition VD Satheesan for spreading misinformation that would only further marginalise the Muslims living in India:

    “The film is a bundle of lies. It says 32,000 women were converted and sent to Islamic State-held areas. Its trailer gave enough hints of its content. It is intended to defame the state and community and Sangh Parivar outfits are behind this.”

    Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan released a statement on 30 April where he slammed Sen for pushing the so-called claim of ‘love-jihad’ through the film, a conspiracy theory pushed by Hindutva members which alleges that Muslim men lure Hindu and Christian women through seduction or kidnapping to convert them into Islam. He further accused the filmmaker of threatening religious harmony by “sowing the seeds of communalism” through the debunked claim that 32,000 women were kidnapped from India and handed over to ISIS.

    “In the movie trailer, we see a hoax that 32,000 women in Kerala were converted and became members of the Islamic State. This bogus story is a product of the Sangh Parivar’s lie factory.”

    The central controversy surrounding the film was it’s claim that 32,000 women were forcibly converted to Islam in Kerala and were sent to ISIS, which has been debunked by several credible publications to be untrue. But speaking to India Today, the producer of the film, Vipul Shah, said that the focus was not the numbers, but the fact that forced conversions are still happening throughout India:

    “We don’t want to get into the debate on the numbers, we want to talk about the issue. We want to bring notice to the human tragedy happening in Kerala and in India.”

    Actor Adah Sharma also defended the movie’s false pretext, by telling India Today that she had spoken to the women who inspired the story:

    “I spoke to some of these women. There will be testimony from those who will be brave enough to come in front of cameras.”

    Politicians like Shashi Tharoor have also slammed the filmmakers for spreading misinformation regarding the 32,000 figure, and addressed it in a lengthy Twitter post where he also said that his 2021 tweet was not proof that the allegations of the filmmakers were real:

    “Many are spreading this 2021 tweet of mine as if it undermines my present objections to the trailer & publicity for “The Kerala Story”. Yes, I was approached then by three Kerala mothers and was aware of a fourth, and I was open about my concerns about their daughters’ radicalisation. But four cases are a far cry from the 32,000 that the film-makers are alleging. If there really were so many ISIS female members from Kerala, that would mean double the number when you count their husbands, whereas even Western intelligence sources says the number of ALL Indians in ISIS does not approach three figures. This gross exaggeration and distortion of the Kerala reality is what I am objecting to.”

    In a tweet posted on Monday, Tharoor offered Rs1 crore to anyone who would be able to prove that 32,000 women had been forcibly converted and sent to ISIS.

    ALT News, in an investigative piece, revealed that the director Sudipto Sen had first mentioned the figure on a Youtube channel ‘The Festival Of Bharat” where he talked about how he calculated the final number, with the help of a speech delivered by the former Kerala CM Oommen Chandy:

    “In 2010, former Kerala CM Oommen Chandy put a report in front of Kerala assembly. In front of my camera, he denied that anything had happened. But in 2010, I documented a case where he (Chandy) said that every year approximately 2,800 to 3,200 girls were taking up Islam. Just calculate it for the following 10 years, and the number is around 32,000.”

    When the publication spoke to Sen on the phone, the author Shinjinee Majumder writes, the director claimed that he picked the number up from an article published by ‘The Times Of India”:

    “This figure (32,000) is not mine. It was a piece of news in The Times of India… one thing I can tell you is that Oommen Chandy, the chief minister of Kerala, had placed this number in the state assembly. So this is not my number, I have got all the documents with me.”

    However, no publication quoting such a large number has come to light. But ALT News reports that in 2012, India Today reported the Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy informing the state minister about how 2,667 young women had converted to Islam between 2006 to 2012. Especially, Chandy had said that there was no evidence of forced conversions in the state, and the fears of ‘love jihad’ were baseless.

    When ANI news shared this report with Sen, his response was:

    “Let the intolerance reach a crescendo. I’ll share my data after the film is released. Why should I defeat the cause of my film?”

    Similarly, Kerala Police had also refuted the claims that 32,000 women had been sent to Syria as “totally baseless”.

    While a report published in 2020 by the United States Department of State’s Country Reports on Terrorism said that there were only 66 known Indian-origin fighters associated with ISIS in 2020, of which 34 terrorism cases were related to ISIS and NIA arrested 160 people by the end of September.

    Moreover, The Hindu reported in June 2021 that four Indian women were traced in an Afghanistani prison, who had travelled with their husbands to join the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), and it was unlikely that they would come back to India.

    As a response to the growing backlash, the film trailer has now changed the title description from 32,000 women to just three young girls, as shared by several Twitter users.

    With the film set to release on 5 May and despite calls to authorities to ban the film on grounds of hate speech and misinformation, NDTV reported today that the Indian Supreme Court had refused to entertain a petition to seek a stay on the release of ‘The Kerala Story’ because it had been cleared by the censor board:

    “There are varieties of hate speeches. This film has got certification and has been cleared by the board. It’s not like a person getting on the podium and starts giving uncontrolled speech. If you want to challenge the release of the movie, you should challenge the certification and through appropriate forum”.

  • Asia’s first monkeypox death reported in India

    Asia’s first monkeypox death reported in India

    India confirmed the death of a 22-year-old man from monkeypox in the southern state of Kerala. The death is India’s as well as Asia’s first death from the disease, reports Reuters. This is the world’s fourth known fatality from the disease.

    Kerala’s revenue minister K Rajan said that the government isolated 21 people who had come in contact with the young man. He further said that the deceased displayed fatigue and fever.

    According to the state’s Health Minister Veena George, the man’s family told the authorities that he had tested positive for monkeypox in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) before returning to India.

    The Indian federal health ministry stated that they had formed a task force to monitor monkeypox cases across the country.

    Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak of monkeypox a global health emergency. No case of monkeypox has been reported in Pakistan. However, 78 countries had reported more than 18,000 cases of monkeypox.

  • Female students in India forced to remove undergarments at test centre during exam

    Female students in India forced to remove undergarments at test centre during exam

    Almost 100 female students were asked to remove their undergarments before taking a medical entrance exam in India. The incident took place at an exam centre in Kollam city. Their parents have filed a complaint.

    Their undergarments were found piled up by students after the exams. The students claimed that they had to go through severe psychological trauma before the exam.

    The father of a 17-year-old girl who was taking her first-ever medical exam claims that his daughter is still recovering from the painful experience of having to take the three-hour exam while not wearing a brassiere.

    The Kerala Police on Tuesday, 19 July, arrested five women who were on duty when girl students appearing for the entrance test were asked to remove their undergarments.

    The institute, where the incident took place, has denied involvement, claiming that the frisking and biometric checks were performed by third-party agencies

  • Man brushes teeth, shaves during viral court hearing

    Man brushes teeth, shaves during viral court hearing

    In an incident at the Kerala High Court, a person was seen either brushing his teeth or shaving, during the proceedings before Justice VG Arun, on Monday, January 17.

    Following the surge in covid-19 cases in the state, the Kerala High Court had decided to conduct virtual hearings. A man who entered the virtual session was seen brushing his teeth or shaving, mostly facing the camera. While it appeared that the judge did not notice the incident, a video of the man was shared across social media.

    The man, in the video, appears to have just woken up and is seen walking back and forth in a room that appears to be a washroom. It appeared that he was either shaving his beard or brushing his teeth during the proceedings and was seen doing so by other attendees.

    As covid-19 cases in India continue to surge, several High Courts have reverted to conducting virtual hearings again. In the first and second waves of the pandemic, many judges had complained about decorum in the virtual courtroom, as people appeared to be carrying out personal activities during the proceedings.

  • Wife dies after snake bite, court finds husband is the murderer

    Wife dies after snake bite, court finds husband is the murderer

    An additional sessions court in Kollam found a man guilty of killing his wife by making a cobra bite her while she was asleep. CNN recently shared the background history of how toxic the marriage was, how they got married and what the demands of the in-laws after the marriage as “Uthra was someone who never saw bad in anyone”.

    According to the judgment, Kumar’s parents demanded Uthra’s parents pay for household appliances, a car, furniture, renovation work, and admission fees for an MBA course for Kumar’s sister.

    “Uthra was someone who never saw bad in anyone,” Vishu said. “Her learning disability meant she didn’t have the means to see that she was being used.”

    Uthra’s father told the court he met all of Kumar’s demands and also paid him 8,000 rupees ($107) per month to take care of his daughter.
    But Kumar grew “dissatisfied” with Uthra’s learning disability, according to the judgment.

    He began to plot her death.

    The prosecution submitted that Sooraj, 27, killed Uthra, 25, last year for her gold jewellery, and to marry another woman. The court found Sooraj guilty under IPC Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 328 (causing hurt by poison) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) in May 2020.

    Uthra spent 52 days in Pushpagiri Hospital in the Kerala town of Thiruvalla recovering from the viper bite, and when she was finally released to her parent’s care on April 22 2020, she was unable to walk.

    As she lay in bed, her leg bandaged after skin grafts, Sooraj decided to strike.

    On May 6, just 15 days after she had left hospital, he smuggled another snake that he had bought from snake handler Chavarukavu Suresh into her parent’s house. This time it was a cobra.

    Before going to bed, Kumar gave Uthra a glass of juice laced with sedatives, according to the judgment. As she slept, Kumar threw the serpent at her, but the reptile didn’t bite, so he grabbed its head and forced its fangs deep into her left arm twice.

    Despite his efforts to make it appear as an accident, a number of clues suggested the bites weren’t natural from the width of the fang marks, the position of the bites, and the impossibility that the cobra had entered the room on its own.

    Police exhumed the cobra and conducted an autopsy to confirm that the same snake had bit Uthra.

    The snake-handler Suresh was also arrested for allegedly supplying the snakes to Sooraj.

  • Girl climbs rooftop to get better signals to attend online classes

    Girl climbs rooftop to get better signals to attend online classes

    A girl in Kerala, India broke the internet for her tireless dedication to studies against all odds. Namitha who is taking online classes during lockdown could only found find manageable signal strength for mobile data on the rooftop. She climbed the rooftop to get better signals to attend her online classes.

    As per reports, Namitha is a student of fifth semester BA English. Namitha Narayana was seeking better connectivity at her home near Kottakkal, Kerala, to attend online classes. Due to poor signal in her room, she climbed up and sat on the tiled rooftop of her house to study without a disturbance.

    Explaining why she chose the rooftop space for study, Namitha said, “We tried all places in my house, including verandas and roofs. And finally, I got fairly good signal strength on the top of our two-storey house.”

    After the pictures did rounds on social media the technical staff of the company came to her home and installed a better internet connection.

    “I am happy I can now learn from the comforts of my house,” said Namitha.

    Her elder sister Nayana too praised the positive response from the network operators and how quickly they worked it out.

    Syed Abid Husain Thangal, MLA of Kottakkal reached out to the family and said, “Namitha’s photo studying from the rooftop has become a symbol of the state’s connectivity. She is also a symbol of the perseverance displayed by the state’s student community. By setting herself an example, Namitha has become an inspiration for others.”

  • Pregnant elephant dies after eating pineapple stuffed with firecrackers in India

    Pregnant elephant dies after eating pineapple stuffed with firecrackers in India

    A pregnant elephant died in Kerala, India after she allegedly ate a pineapple stuffed with firecrackers. The fruit exploded in her mouth badly damaging her jaw and eventually causing her death.

    The Kerala Forest Department has lodged an FIR (First Information Report) against those responsible for the death of a 15-year-old pregnant wild elephant.

    The Wildlife Warden of the Silent Valley National Park said this was a serious crime whosoever was behind it.

    “We are quite certain that we will find the perpetrators of this crime, which is in no way acceptable at all. It was on the 23rd of last month we came to know about this incident when the elephant was spotted near a water source outside the national park,” said Pachuau.

    As per reports, some people had placed firecrackers inside a pineapple and this was eaten by the wild elephant and in the process of chewing the cracker burst and injured the elephant.

    “We called a veterinarian and later on the 25th, an elephant expert David Abraham came and examined and explained to us the bad situation,” said Pachuau.

    “We informed the Forest officials that its situation was bad and two days later the elephant died in the water.”

    The next day, when we conducted the post-mortem we found a nearly two-month-old fetus. From the uterus, we could make out it was the first pregnancy of the elephant. That sight left many of us deeply sad and moved.

    Only when we conducted the autopsy, we could see that the upper and lower jaw, teeth and tongue of the elephant was badly damaged. The cause of death is due to the aspiration of the lungs as it was filled with water. It was a sad day for many of us,” said Abraham.

    Soon after the autopsy was conducted, the dead elephant was buried in the Forest.

    “Two sets of teams are probing this incident,” added Pachuau.

    Meanwhile, several Bollywood stars including Anushka Sharma and Varun Dhawan condemned the incident and called for harsher laws against animal cruelty.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CA99hNLB9Sa/

  • Indian court allows man to go out to buy food for cats amid strict lockdown

    The Kerala High Court approved permission to a petitioner on Monday to travel to get “Meo-Persian biscuits” for three of his cats amid the strict coronavirus lockdown in India.

    N Prakash who is an  owner of three cats, had moved the court after he was denied to travel by police to get food for his pets.

    According to the directives by the Kerala government, residents have to get a travel permit based on an affidavit for leaving their houses, even if  they have to go to buy essential food items.

    Prakash, stated in his petition, that “as a pure vegetarian, he could not cook non-vegetarian food in his house”. He said that he had applied for the travel pass online, but his application was rejected.

    Upon hearing the appeal, the judge said that the petitioner could go to buy cat food on the basis of a self declaration, along with a court order.

    He added that the court will pass a general order in this regard to cover situations like this.

  • Groom gifts 100 books as haq mahr to his bride

    Groom gifts 100 books as haq mahr to his bride

    A man from Kerala Ijas Hakim has given 100 books as ‘Haq Mahr’ to his wife. This Kerala couple and their mahr went viral on the internet.

    The bride Ajna Nizam got 100 books that she wanted to read. Ijas knew her favorite ones because she gave him a list of 100 books that she wants to read. The books included the Quran, Bible and Bhagavad Gita, Constitution of India and Khaled Hosseini’s books and some from Murakami (Murakami is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally).

    Normally mahr is either a large sum of money or valuables or property that a Muslim man gives to his bride at the time of the nikkah.

    Soon the couple and their story started doing rounds on the internet. Neither Ijas nor Ajna wanted to end up as a viral couple goal but their friends made that happen.