Toolkit of propaganda

Liberals offended by the film The Kerala Story have been hung up on one blatant inaccuracy in its teaser, which is that 32,000 non-Muslim women from Kerala were enticed into the Islamic State by Muslim men. This misses the wood for the trees. That the producers have, in the face of widespread criticism, quickly removed that lie from their promotional material indicates that the number, 32,000 or 3, is not central to the story. The overall purport of the film remains, which is that Islam is waging a Love Jihad, a phrase that to a poet must translate as ‘war by love’ but, alas, to the loveless Indian right wing accords to ‘they are stealing our women’.

If facts were at all germane to the issue, the alleged imputations contained in The Kerala Story are easily repudiated. There is a lot of evidence, reported by the Indian government in Parliament and by the US State Department, to suggest that Indian Muslims’ participation in the Caliphate has been minimal, in the mere tens rather than thousands. That single fact, negligible participation by the third largest Muslim population in the world, attests to the loyalties of Indian Muslims and proves the merit of our plurality. However, facts are not what one judges a film by. It is meaning one looks at. Among our mass media, cinema is special in that it is allowed artistic licence. An artist uses this liberty to show a deeper truth to society. A propagandist also infests this space but uses it to spread a lie. He’s a parasite that feeds off the freedom afforded to the artist by society.

It was in this vein that the Israeli film-maker Nadav Lapid rejected the inclusion of the propaganda film The Kashmir Files in the International Film Festival of India last year, characterising it as “a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section”. Rejecting The Kerala Story as art is all that we can do too. To an artist that should be humiliating enough.

It is more useful to see the film as the latest product of a propaganda supply line that came into being imperceptibly even before we elected the present brand of the BJP. Bollywood’s hoary tradition of Desh ki Dharti patriotism segued into a conveyor belt of jingoist films whose names are not important and best forgotten. The thing to note about these flicks is that they are not conventional Bollywood commercial films; they are made only to lend themselves to the BJP’s agenda of the moment, mainly to poison the air, polarise voters and win an election. They cast nobodies and are shot mostly in a warehouse. They make no effort at authenticity. When was the last time the Hindi film industry made a film about the South? And which casting director would choose three Sindhis to play Malayali girls?

Films like The Kerala Story are meant to serve as triggers for the BJP’s 360 degree propaganda machinery to kick into overdrive. The party has an entire prefabricated amplifying ecosystem of trolls, editors, spokesmen, rent-a-reviewers and phantom audiences to act on the trigger and talk up the lie. In the case of The Kerala Story, the lie is meant to stoke an ancient tribal fear, of women being taken away. It’s a mind game played upon the Hindu patriarch, a prod to his misplaced sense of ownership, and at the same time a reduction of women to the status of chattel. The fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has waved the green flag to the film shows that the BJP believes that the only way the South will open up to it is to aggravate that fear.