And he is our lawmaker? NCP MLA Jitendra Awhad terms The Kerala Story bogus, says "producer should be hanged in public"

Amid massive uproar over the film The Kerala Story, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) senior leader Jitendra Awhad has sparked a fresh controversy stating that the producer of the movie Vipul Amrutlal Shah should be hanged in public.

 

 

Citing the ‘misquoted’ figure of 32,000 women who had allegedly gone missing and joined the ISIS, Awhad said that the film is not based on facts and should be stopped from screening.

 

He tweeted in Marathi “In other words, you want to defame your female sisters? To show that our female sisters are stupid and don’t understand anything and ultimately to portray women as subordinate in a male-dominated culture. This is the real truth of the movie based on Kerala. Such films are made with the calculation of creating violence, hatred on the basis of lies and winning elections through the same.”

 

 

The part about the public hanging can be heard between 02:10 and 02:20 in this video. The movie – based on real-life stories of non-Muslim women from Kerala getting converted to Islam and joining the terrorist group Islamic State – has been a subject of intense public debate.

 

While the film has been doing well at the box office, it has faced severe backlash some political parties and social groups. While on the one hand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have declared the movie tax-free, the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government banned the movie from the state.

 

Several calls for violence against the movie-makers and theatres screening the movie have come up in the last few days, including from Jharkhand Congress MLA Irfan Ansari.

 

The crew members of the film have also received 'threat messages' asking them not to step out of their homes and that they did not “do good by showing the movie.” Reacting to the ban, producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah said that “If the state government won’t listen to us, we will pursue legal avenues.”