Ignore any lofty claims about the Bollywood hit The Kerala Story: this film will only incite hatred against Muslims | Asim Ali

The controversial film championed by the BJP is an Islamophobic fantasy

Two weeks after I was born in the curfewed town of Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, the Aligarh riots of 1990 broke out. What began as skirmishes exploded into widespread bloodletting after three leading Hindi daily newspapers published front-page headlines reporting the targeted killing of Hindus inside a hospital run by Muslims. Those killings turned out to be the fevered imaginings of two Hindu eyewitnesses". But the actual massacres ignited by this fake news eventually left about a hundred people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims.

A fortnight ago, I watched the new Bollywood hit The Kerala Story, in a rundown cinema in Delhi. The sluggish air conditioning seemed to have given up against the sultry May heat. A group of (largely) young Hindu men packed out the theatre. Occasionally, they broke out into passionate chants of Jai Shri Ram", the cry that often accompanies videos of vigilante violence" committed against Muslims. Yet when they streamed out of the theatre, they looked more horrified than enraged, like sports fans numbed after their side has taken one beating after another. The rolling spectacle of an all-round Hindu humiliation" - including graphic scenes depicting Hindu women being violently raped by Muslims - had lasted for more than two hours.

Asim Ali is an independent political researcher and columnist based in Delhi