Mea Culpa. This reporter is a wrong person to write about The Kerala Story, a film by two non Malayalis, director Sudipto Sen and producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah, which has been praised by the highest political leadership in the land, given tax exemption in several states, and has now earned immortality by being screened to young parish audiences in Kerala by Catholic clergy. It is another point that the film has an Adults Only certification and priests break the law, and their ecclesiastical vows, by exposing young minds to it.
In the past, Archbishops waived strict Catholic norms to allow a son to wed a beautiful Hindu woman, and then a dearly loved niece to marry a strapping Palaghat Muslim. They then presided over the holy mass as celebrant. The couples had met at college, or at work. No one had to convert.
These are of course exceptions. Most Christian denominations will not allow a marriage outside their fold. One sect will even disown the erring member.
And they do reflect an unacceptable and toxic mix of orthodoxy with a dose of patriarchy and racism in the guise of tradition and culture. But not communalism, or religious targeting.
But then that was the purpose of, first, making this film, and then, of using it to teach future generations that their wonderful Muslim neighbour was seducing them to make them into sex slaves for some Islamic terrorist group.
Not that terrorist groups, Islamic, Christian or even some “Indic” faiths have not used women students they captured, or attracted, as camp followers in various hotspots of the world. West Asia, Africa and lesser home have witnessed this. Japan, before the second world war, had made it into military practice in conquered Korea, and parts of China.
Known, but less researched by government, politicians, and film makers, is the continued white slavery in which India figures in a major way, as a point of origin and a destination – much like drugs – with tentacles in Nepal, Bangladesh, Central Asia and some of the former Soviet republics of east Europe. It occasionally bursts into news or high-level gossip when some VVIP gets caught, as happened to a protestant Bishop in North india who was sacked when tapes were released of him frolicking with Slav women in his bedroom.
The church hierarchy needs to be questioned on how it zeroes down on an issue it thinks is critical, and could do untold damage to society, specially the family unit which the community holds dear, seeing in it the loving bond between Mary, baby Jesus, and Joseph, the Holy Family.
The church runs many de-addiction centres, but has never had the energy, or the funds, to do a survey of the community to assess the incidence of drug use among its youth. The matter figured tangentially in the early sessions of two Papal surveys, the two-year long Family Synod, followed by the Synodality exercise – priest and lay, rich and poor walking together as one – which is now concluding. It never figured in the final documents.
Both synods were designed to assess the health of the global Catholic community and to help the Pope and his curia evolve guidelines for the future. That is how the church has evolved in the last 60 years or so since the Second Vatican council brought radical changes in the thinking and practices of the faith. Pope Francis now washes the feet of women prisoners on Maundy Thursday. And Mass is celebrated in your mother tongue, not Latin.
Other seminal issues face the church at large. How to respond to the continuing existence of bigamy in the community, specially in Tribal areas, but not confined to it. With the church recognising but one marriage, there are issues of single parents, the education of children, and the consequent social trauma.
The existence of the dowry system so horrible as to verge on the criminal which has never been outlawed, is the elephant in the room.
But what is possibly most shameful is the existence of caste in the Indian church. Three popes, from John Paul II, now raised as. Saint, his successor Benedict and now Francis, have condemned the persistence of case in Indian Christianity. But no one seems to have been shamed. Converts from the former Untouchable Castes, called Dalit Christians, have been agitating against the government and the church hierarchy for years.
The most crucial issue for the church hierarchy in recent times would be to revive the community being the conscience of the nation, and a bulwark of its civil society. Though sometimes seen as a consequence, and possible appendage, of colonialism, members of the community in India, and the then Portuguese-controlled Goa, were among leading freedom fighters. That they have not been recorded in the nation’s large Tamra Patra is as much the community’s incoherence as the government’s lack of interest, perhaps guided by narrow political considerations.
Since the community does not undertake any exercise, or even urge the government to do so, for instance on the pattern of the Justice Sachar Committee report ordered by the Congress government of Dr Manmohan Singh, there is no real data other than of the national sample surveys to asses poverty, unemployment, land holdings, or even education in the community which otherwise boasts of being the classroom of the nation.
That is a very heavy platter before leaders of the Christian community, and specially of the Catholic church which has the personnel, the money and the political clout. This must be its social and political priority. The future will depend on it, define areas of work, of demands to be raised before government, and of reforms to be contemplated.
And yet they fritter away energies battling windmills and chasing shadows. One such shadow is Love Jihad, a term in a way jointly fathered by the church together with a Kerala High Court judge and the locals some years go. The ludicrous pith of the case was that well-financed and trained Muslim young men were seducing young Catholic women, converting them to Islam, and then either marrying them or selling them off. It rapidly spread through the community, within and outside Kerala. Mothers cautioned daughters. Priests harangued congregation from pulpits.
Also read: Filmmakers of ‘The Kerala Story’ Wish to Have Their Cake and Eat it Too
But no one really wanted to find out the reality, or adduce any data. This reporter at that time beseeched the hierarchy to give some data, any data, of the number of Catholic girls, or of any other denomination, who had married Muslims in or outside the state. And if possible, the number or Christian women in the same period who had married men of other religions.
It would also help analysis if we had the number of women who remained unmarried because their fathers could not afford the dowries parents of eligible grooms were asking. And, finally, the number of Christian young women who had committed suicide, or just run away, never to be heard from ever.
Years later, this data remains non-existent. As part of some public hearing, this writer also investigated a few such cases, including the Hadiya case which made headlines. We could talk to the young women. The falsehood of the case filled the hall.
And yet, the high court put its stamp of recognition to the idea of ‘Love Jihad’ manufactured by Hindutva groups, ordering the police chief to conduct a comprehensive investigation. It cited a previous Kerala high court judgment which had “taken note of the functioning of radical organisations pursuing activities of converting young girls of Hindu religion to Islam on the pretext of love.”
Researcher and writer Dr Sanjukta Basu, who this writer had first met in the Karawan-e-Mohabbat led by author, columnist and social activist Harsh Mander, wrote that ‘Love Jihad’ myth and ‘honour’ killings are two sides of the same coin The ‘Love Jihad’ myth and ‘honour’ killings are then based on the same logic – a world in which women are incapable of knowing what’s best for them.
The Union government had to admit in Parliament that ‘Love Jihad’ was a myth with no data or traceable facts to back up its premise. The court could admit no more. It could hardly indict its own party or the other RSS of having invented this factoid to indict every inter-faith marriage, as the anti conversion bills had done to the constitutionally citizen practicing freedom of religion in the country.
As some of the best thinkers, writers and film makers of Kerala noted in a recent joint statement, The Kerala Story perpetuates misinformation and unfounded propaganda against the Muslim community. It distorts facts and inflates figures to fuel anti-Muslim sentiments. Senior advocate Harish Salve, representing the filmmaker in the Supreme Court’s hearing on Bengal government banning the film, admitted there was no authentic data supporting the claim of 32,000 conversions. It was pure fiction.
It is beyond understanding that clergy, highly educated at expense of the lay community, could not see through why Prime Minister Narendra Modi was praising the film on the eve of the general elections in which he is trying hard to get even a single seat to mark the party’s presence in Kerala. The state’s competitive demography tame excuse to support the malicious screenings of this film to young audiences.
The government itself is spreading divisive narratives against the Muslim community. In supporting the government and ruling party stance, the church risks becoming complicit in a conspiracy that is divisive, demonises a fellow minority, weaponises human coexistence, and which will ultimately destroy the fraternal fabric which the Constitution wove for modern India.
For the record, the National Investigative Agency has said that three out of the six women who went to West Asia were Muslims, while two converted to Islam from Christianity one from Hinduism. The alarming figure of 32,000 women becoming Muslims is as fake as the economic data given by the Union finance minister.
John Dayal is a human rights activist and author.
