Shillong, May 2: The Kerala Story, a Hindi film directed by Sudipto Sen, has been making headlines ever since its teaser debuted in 2017.
The Censor Board has awarded the film, which debuts on May 5, an A certificate. According to reports, the CBFC removed ten scenes, one of which was an interview with a former chief minister of Kerala. The rumoured Kerala chief minister is VS Achuthanandan.
According to reports, another sequence that is thought to have been cut contained “dialogues and inappropriate references to all Hindu Gods.” Evidently, several dialogues were changed as well. The word “Indian” is believed to have been removed from a discussion that allegedly read, “Indian communists are the biggest hypocrites.”
In a TV interview, a former chief minister of Kerala predicted that due to youth conversion to Islam, Kerala would become a Muslim-majority state over the next two decades. The CBFC demanded that the whole television interview be cut from the movie.
When the teaser for The Kerala Story, which was released in November 2022 and featured a character named Shalini Unnikrishnan aka Fatima Ba, claimed that 32000 women had been recruited by ISIS in Kerala, and that she was one of them, the story sparked controversy.
The Kerala administration, along with the leaders of the opposition, has recently urged that the movie be outlawed there. Congress and CPM opposed the Hindi movie’s release there, but movie theatres had a different viewpoint. The public will eventually view the movie on OTT, according to movie exhibitors, hence it is best to release it in theatres.