Amid The Kerala Story row, AR Rahman shares video of Hindu couple tying knot in mosque

Bravo 🙌🏽 love for humanity has to be unconditional and healing ❤️‍🩹 https://t.co/X9xYVMxyiF

— A.R.Rahman (@arrahman) May 4, 2023

The News Minute video report states that as the bride’s mother was struggling financially, she approached the local mosque’s committee in Kerala’s Alappuzha city and sought help with her daughter’s wedding. The mosque committee immediately offered monetary aid to the bride’s family and hosted the wedding in their house of worship.

“This is conveying a message to Kerala. Not just Kerala, but the whole nation, especially in these troubled times when people are being killed in the name of religion. Here we are teaching people to love each other. That is the message we are giving,” Alappuzha MP AM Arif told The News Minute.

The Oscar-winning maestro’s post comes at a time when controversy over The Kerala Story, written and directed by Sudipto Sen and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, is at its peak. The film is purportedly based on the alleged radicalisation and conversion of young Hindu women to Islam in Kerala, before inducting them into the terrorist outfit Islamic State (IS).

Several senior politicians, including Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, had recently condemned the film. While Vijayan slammed the makers saying they were taking up the Sangh Parivar propaganda of projecting Kerala as a centre of religious extremism by raising the issue of ‘love jihad’ — a concept rejected by the courts, probe agencies and even the Union Home Ministry — senior Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor stated that the film “may be *your* Kerala story. It is not *our* Kerala story.”

Meanwhile, amid backlash for its factual inaccuracies, the trailer for the controversial upcoming film The Kerala Story was altered recently. While the trailer originally suggested that the film is based on the stories of more than 32,000 Kerala women who’d allegedly been radicalised by Islamic fundamentalists, the revised version of the trailer description on YouTube says that the film is based on the “true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala.”

On the other hand, the Supreme Court Thursday refused to entertain a petition challenging the CBFC certification granted to the controversial movie. A bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandarchud said the Central Board of Film Certification has already certified the film.