The Kerala Story is a 2023 Indian Hindi-language propaganda drama film, claiming to be inspired from true events, directed by Sudipto Sen and produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah.

[11][12] It was heavily promoted by the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leveraged the film in its campaigning for the Karnataka assembly election.

[15][16][6] The film has also faced protracted litigation and protests, primarily in Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

She frequently insists that there is only one religion and one god in the world, warning that people who don’t believe in this will never attain salvation.

Over time, Shalini and Gitanjali start wearing the hijab and begin to believe in the ideology that only one god exists.

[19][20] Prior to its domestic release, the film went through CBFC scrutiny and received an adults only classification following a number of requested changes.

[24][25][26] While the events portrayed in the film are loosely based on the accounts of three women from Kerala, namely: Nimisha Nair, Sonia Sebastian, and Merin Jacob, who converted to Islam and traveled with their respective husbands to Afghanistan to join the Islamic State between 2016 and 2018, the claimed figures in the film are wildly inaccurate, being based on mistranslations, misquotes, and misrepresentations of unrelated statistics.

[32][33] BJP President J. P. Nadda held special screenings of the film and invited "young Hindu girls" to watch it with them.

[23][35][36] In Tamil Nadu, protests were held by Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK) and multiple Muslim political organisations.

[44] Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV rated the film 0.5 out of 5 stars, calling it a "lengthy WhatsApp forward", and writing that Sen's work was laughably inept and in pursuance of an insidious agenda.

[45] Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, characterising it as a "poorly-made, poorly-acted rant" that flattened Muslims into absolute evils.

[46] Nandini Ramnath of Scroll.in found the raison d'être of the film to lie in propagating Islamophobia, with every Muslim character being coded as a fanatic.

[47] Anuj Kumar of The Hindu described the work as "burlesque" propaganda that borrowed its understanding of Islam, from "hate-filled Whatsapp groups" and sought to turn the audience into purveyors of hate by peddling "half-truths".