‘The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond’ review: A film that brings the war on Muslims home

Sudipto Sen’s The Kerala Story (2023) was an unabashedly communal film that passed itself off as a social drama inspired by actual incidents. The Kerala Story depicted Hindu women being seduced by Muslim men, converted to Islam and recruited into the Islamic State terrorist group. The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond brings the war on Muslims home.

Directed by Kamakhya Narayan Singh this time and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah once again, the spiritual sequel has three targets: Muslims, inter-faith relationships and the right to conversion. Shah and Amarnath Jha have written a film that shows Muslims as part of a “Ghazwa-e-Hind” mission to trick Hindu women into marriage, proselytise them by persuasion or force, make them pregnant and thereby catapult Muslims from distant minority into undisputed majority.

The aim, a cleric states, is to change India’s demographics within the next 25 years so that the country will be a Muslim nation ruled by sharia law.

In Kochi, Surekha (Ulka Gupta) is duped by the self-declared liberal journalist Salim (Sumit Gahlawat) into a live-in relationship. Salim assures the progressive-minded Surekha that he will neither make her convert not compel her to wear a hijab. Like every Muslim character in the movie, Salim is a deceiver, part of the larger conspiracy to increase...

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