My eyes paused while watching the trailer of ‘The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond’, released in mid-February 2026. It opened with a stark voice-over: ‘Inshallah, all of Bharat will become an Islamic state in the next 25 years, and all of Bharat will be ruled under Sharia’.

I had read this line somewhere. I started to remind myself and I was finally at the ‘PFI India Vision 2047’ document, seized by Bihar Police in Phulwari Sharif in July 2022, which echoed a similar statement: ‘We dream of 2047 where the political power has returned to the Muslim community from whom it was unjustly taken away by the British Raj’. Separately, the NIA told a Kochi court in June 2025 that it had recovered PFI hit lists naming more than 950 people in Kerala, among them a former district judge.

Within hours of the trailer’s release, a predictable backlash arose. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan called it false propaganda, leaders of the Congress-led UDF joined in, and Rahul Gandhi later said films and media were being ‘weaponised’ to divide society, adding that nobody was really watching the film. From the film fraternity, Anurag Kashyap dismissed it as propaganda and Prakash Raj mocked it with photographs of beef, pork and fish. It was appalling to see Sudipto Sen, the original director of The Kerala Story, distance himself from the sequel, saying he could not rely on ‘WhatsApp forwards or newspaper reports’.

Directors can have their own reservations about how a film is narrated; however, calling it mere propaganda without a factual rebuttal is an intellectual injustice against a work that highlights a pressing issue, particularly when the pattern it depicts is neither exclusively Hindu in origin nor uniquely Indian.

It was not the RSS or the VHP that first raised the alarm. It was the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council (KCBC). In October 2009, its newsletter Jagratha warned Catholic parents that young Muslim men were courting their daughters in order to convert them, and listed schoolgirls, college students, working women and even housewives as targets.

Further, around the same time, KCBC claimed that up to 4,500 Hindu and Christian girls had been targeted.

The sequel’s central thesis is simple: grooming, coerced conversion, radicalisation and ‘targeting non-Muslim women’ is a documented phenomenon in India and neighbouring countries. And I believe, this pattern is not just South Asian, but today, an unavoidable part of the West and its part of Asia too.

It has devastated indigenous ethnic minorities and native faith adherents like Yazidi communities in Iraq, Kurdish women in Syria, native Africans as well as Christian schoolgirls in Nigeria, Ethiopian Jews, as well as the tribal populations across the Indian subcontinent; even in the heart of the ‘first world’, the systematic targeting of ‘young white girls’ in the UK, stands as a stark and disturbing example.

So, the debate is not about isolated consensual interfaith relationships. It’s about why this underlying pattern faces outright denial despite the evidence available globally.

Three questions follow. Is the pattern real in Kerala? Does it reach beyond Kerala? And if both are true, why is it denied?

IF WE START from The Kerala Story 2, then, the common criticism of the sequel is that it ‘overgeneralises’ and ‘exaggerates’ the issue. Start with Kerala.

The Popular Front of India (PFI), despite being headquartered in Delhi, was most active in Kerala and what its India Vision 2047 says is something that I need not repeat. Plus, yes, it has been banned under UAPA in 2022 for terror funding, radicalisation, armed training camps, and secessionist operations, but the Enforcement Directorate alleges that SDPI, a registered political party, is its front, and in March 2025 the agency arrested SDPI’s national president, M.K. Faizy. Kerala’s police chief, Rawada A. Chandrasekhar, has said that PFI activists moved to the SDPI after the ban.

On all this, the Kerala government’s response has been half-hearted. State police did assist NIA raids and arrests involving PFI-linked modules, but proactive state action wasn’t something that was adopted. Legally speaking, SDPI remains a registered political party. If this is a threat or not, you decide.

Then, ideologically, the LDF prefers to equate radical Islamist and Hindutva groups as equal threats, projecting a secular image. This image motivates calling films like The Kerala Story 2 propaganda.

This happens because the Left has historically benefited from a fragmented Muslim vote, using SDPI to indirectly weaken the IUML within the UDF. Critics call it vote-bank politics, as the state has a growing minority Abrahamic religious population (18.38% Christians, 26.56% Muslims), while 54.73% remain Hindu, with Muslims forming the second largest religious group in Kerala.

Thus, by prioritising ‘secular harmony’ optics and avoiding confrontation with influential minority organisations like IUML (core member of UDF-Congress led), WPI, Samastha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama (strongly tied to IUML & UDF), SDPI, Mujahid groups and Jamaat-e-Islami, the state effectively delegates the primary burden of countering radicalisation to central agencies while preserving its own political equilibrium. The result is ‘reactive cooperation’ rather than ‘decisive local initiative’.

By Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s own count in September 2021, around 100 Malayalis had joined ISIS by 2019. Of them, 72 were drawn in after going abroad for work; of the 28 who left from Kerala itself, five were converts to Islam.

People from Kerala joined ISIS through a mix of online radicalisation, a Salafi turn and the pull of a utopian caliphate. An Observer Research Foundation primer notes that social media propaganda, which reached Malayalam speakers and urged hijrah, migration to the caliphate, is usually only the last step in a long process.

Reporting in 2016 traced the missing Keralites to a hardline Salafi milieu, including a commune in the Athikkad hills near Nilambur that sought to live as in the Prophet’s time and had ties to Salafi communities abroad. Families in Kasaragod described young men who grew beards, cut off relatives, prayed apart and disconnected their television sets before they disappeared. NPR reported in 2019 that a teacher who had worked in the Gulf befriended young local men there and radicalised them through the internet and friendship; a Muslim scholar in the district argued that returning Gulf migrants were bringing back more conservative views.

Recent police cases suggest that recruiters have also turned to poor Dalit and tribal youth for conversion to Islam followed by radicalisation. Recruiters can exploit caste-based discrimination and economic vulnerabilities by offering promises of social dignity, financial support, free education in Salafi madrasas, and a sense of purpose.

In June 2025, a 15-year-old Dalit girl from Uttar Pradesh, missing since May, escaped her captors in Kerala and reached the police at Thrissur railway station. Police alleged that she had been offered money, pressured to convert and pushed toward extremist activity, and arrested two people; she told them other minor girls were being targeted too.

This suggests a shift from earlier recruitment among educated Muslim youth toward exploiting Hindu society’s caste fault lines for long-term expansion. This trend is part of a broader jihadist tactic of targeting marginalised communities globally, though in India it is most prominently reported from southern states with strong Salafi networks.

The same can be traced in the PFI 2047 Vision document titled ‘Towards Rule of Islam in India’, which says the group plans to ‘create a split between RSS and SCs/STs/OBCs’ by projecting the RSS as an organisation concerned only with upper-caste Hindus.

Kerala is not the only place where converts became recruits. Islamist groups like ISIS have actively targeted non-Muslims from liberal or secular backgrounds for conversion, as converts often become highly zealous recruits seeking a strong identity and purpose after rejecting their previous progressive lifestyles. Pew Research Center put the Muslim population of the EU, Norway and Switzerland at 25.8 million, or 4.9%, in 2016, driven by migration and higher fertility.

This has created de facto enclaves in Western Europe with native white flight and limited state control (called ‘no-go-zones’). Sweden’s police (Dec 2025) list 65 vulnerable areas (19 particularly vulnerable with parallel societies and police access difficulties) and France has hundreds of priority urban districts (formerly 751 ZUS) many of them home to large immigrant populations. Similar patterns exist in Germany and the UK as well.

These zones have fueled radicalisation, producing a sharp rise in European recruits to ISIS and Al-Qaeda: By late 2015, the Soufan Group estimated, about 5,000 fighters had gone to Syria and Iraq from Western Europe, including some 1,700 from France, 760 each from Britain and Germany, and 470 from Belgium, far higher per capita than in low-migration Eastern Europe.

Converts from Christian or non-religious liberal families have a disproportionately high share of ISIS foreign fighters and attackers. Similarly, ‘reverted’ Muslims (those who shifted from secular-liberal lifestyles to stricter Islamic practice) are frequently targeted during their phase of identity crisis and guilt.

Maajid Nawaz, a liberal British-Pakistani’s story in ‘Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism’ (Book + Talks) and Deeyah Khan’s documentary Jihad: A Story of the Others can be referred to understand how and why this happens.

Reports also suggest that since the October 2023 Israel-Hamas war, this trend has accelerated worldwide, serving as a catalyst for self-radicalisation through social media by intensifying grievances and narratives of defending Muslims against perceived Western/Zionist and Hindutva oppression.

This acceleration draws on a solidarity narrative for both Palestine and Kashmir, which frames the two causes as part of the same global struggle against oppression. Hashtags such as #FreePalestine, #AllEyesOnGaza, and #KashmirIsThePalestineOfTheEast have helped globalise the narrative, fostering a sense of transnational Muslim brotherhood (Ummah) and encouraging vulnerable youth, including secular and liberal Muslims, to view jihadist ideology as a legitimate form of resistance and solidarity.

And how does Kerala’s political class respond when such solidarity is organised at home? In October 2023, Jamaat-e-Islami-linked Solidarity Youth Movement (SYM) organised a pro-Palestine event in Malappuram. Former Hamas chief Khaled Mashal addressed the rally virtually from Qatar, urging Muslims to unite when the enemies of Islam unite against them and describing the fight in Palestine as a defence against Zionist terror. During the rally, the SYM raised the slogan, ‘Uproot bulldozer Hindutva and apartheid Zionism’.

The SYM’s state president said there were ‘no issues’ because Hamas is not banned in India, and that the organisers had taken legal opinion; police said only that they were looking into it. This is how loopholes are used to support an anti-Semitic organisation like Hamas.

This selective approach reflects a wider dynamic in Kerala politics, where electoral stability and the need to accommodate influential ideological organisations with strong minority support often lead to a lenient stance on certain issues, while similar expressions from the other ideological spectrum face sharper scrutiny.

What do the analysts say on this? Some analysts draw parallels between contemporary Kerala politics and pre-1979 Iran, where tactical alliances between leftist groups and Islamists converged against the Shah (aligned to ‘Imperialist America’), only to collapse violently once the Islamists seized power.

In Iran, leftist women from the Fedayeen, the Tudeh Party and the MEK who had supported the revolution were later imprisoned, tortured and executed. Fatemeh Zarei, a physics teacher from Shiraz and an MEK supporter, spent seven years in prison before she was killed in the 1988 executions of political prisoners. Those killings were protested and recorded by Ayatollah Montazeri, who was designated successor to Khomeini, the supreme leader of the theocratic regime in Iran, from 1985 until 1989, and who recorded them in his memoirs.

The contexts differ, but the comparison is invoked to caution that such coalitions, ‘marriage of inconveniences’ of secular-marxists and Islamists formed for short-term alignment, carry long-term risks. Thus, a similar dynamic is visible in Kerala today, where both CPI(M)-led LDF and the Congress-led UDF have at times accepted the electoral support of Islamist outfits such as SDPI (widely seen as the political front of banned PFI), Jamaat-e-Islami, and its youth wing SYM.

These ‘Red-Green’ alliances are often justified as a strategy to consolidate minority votes and counter the BJP’s ‘majoritarian politics’. The LDF, in particular, fears that aggressive action against SDPI could alienate a key Muslim vote bank (around 27% of the population) in the state. But we know that such a coalition risks empowering more radical elements at the expense of the very secular and progressive forces they march with, including women and vulnerable youth across all communities, irrespective of their niche voters in the state.

IT SEEMS THAT it’s not just about the majority Hindus about whom the political class of Kerala doesn’t care, but also about the minority Christians too. Consider Sonia Sebastian, a Roman Catholic engineering graduate from Kasaragod. She converted to Islam, taking the name Ayisha, after marrying Abdul Rashid Abdulla in 2011; the NIA later charged that the couple had held secret classes in support of ISIS.

In 2016, they travelled with their child to join ISKP in Afghanistan. They were among 21 Keralites, several of them converts from Hindu and Christian families, who left India that year to join the ‘caliphate’ and live in Dar-al-Islam (region under Islamic rule). They went to live a pure Islamic life, which was not possible in the land of Kuffar/idol-worshippers and their government (non-Muslims, in our case: Hindus).

What was the result? Sonia Sebastian, with her child, surrendered after her husband’s death to the Afghan National Security Forces (under the pre-Taliban Afghan government) after the collapse of ISIS in November 2019. In a video interview recorded in Afghanistan and released by StratNews Global, she said she wanted to return to India.

Her father, VJ Sebastian, approached the Supreme Court of India in 2021 seeking her repatriation. The Indian government has been reluctant, as repatriation in such cases becomes highly contested when participation was voluntary, as confessed by Sonia herself. She was held in Kabul’s Pul-e-Charkhi prison with three other Kerala women from the same module; her status since the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021 is unclear. Seeking some things late becomes impossible to achieve.

Similarly, thousands of foreign nationals, including many Europeans, remain held in northeast Syrian camps under extremely harsh conditions.

This is the inevitable consequence of rejecting one’s safe haven, alienating one’s native culture in search for someone else’s paradise.

Kerala’s educated, politically aware youth, remittance economy, and close ties to the Gulf have made it fertile ground for recruiters, as the ISIS figures above show.

The churches were right when they did the following: a post-synodal pastoral circular/letter was issued by Cardinal George Alencherry, which was formally read out in churches during Sunday Mass on 19 January 2020. The church synod, held in Kochi (Ernakulam), had declared days earlier that love jihad was real; the circular itself spoke of inter-religious love affairs with bad intentions.

Now, understand, despite all this publicly available evidence, the self-proclaimed rationalists of the CPI(M)-affiliated SFI found it better to organise a beef festival mocking the Kerala Story sequel’s depiction of coercion rather than accepting the facts available on one click.

That answers the first question. The second is whether the pattern stops at Kerala’s border.

THE PATTERN OF targeting non-Muslim women is not Indian. It’s transnational. And it effectively shatters the arguments in favour of ‘BJP-RSS anti-Muslim politics’ in India narrative.

ISIS-inspired jihadist groups present the enslavement of non-Muslim/kuffar women, labelled spoils of war/mal-e-ghanima/sabaya/concubines/sex slaves, as religiously ‘permissible’ to justify the systematic enslavement and sexual exploitation of non-Muslim women and girls captured during jihad.

For example, ISIS declared Yazidi women in particular as legitimate ‘war booty’, claiming they could be raped, sold, gifted, or kept as concubines, per their interpretation of Sharia.

Upon further research, what I came across was more damning, the group even established a formal ‘Department of War Spoils’ to regulate the trade of female captives. This ideology was openly promoted in the fourth issue of its propaganda magazine Dabiq (October 2014), which declared that Yazidi women could be taken as slaves.

During the 2014 Yazidi genocide in Sinjar, thousands of women and girls were abducted, sold in Iraq and Syria, and subjected to repeated sexual abuse by ISIS fighters, as the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found in 2016.

In January 2026, during clashes between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led SDF, a militiaman reportedly linked to the government posted a video holding what he claimed was a braid cut from a Kurdish woman fighter, prompting a global braiding campaign in solidarity.

Captive non-Muslim women were treated as property, and the children of the caliphate as its future: boys were to be raised as mujahideen to sustain its ideology across generations.

ISIS invested heavily in the ‘Cubs of the Caliphate’ (Ashbal al-Khilafah) program to create long-term ideological loyalty. ISIS separated Yazidi boys over the age of seven from their families, sent them to recruitment camps for Quranic indoctrination and military training (including use of weapons), and aimed to turn them into mujahideen.

The kids are trained to view violence as a way of life and to become the next generation of devoted fighters and suicide bombers, ensuring the caliphate’s continuity. Unfortunately, this practice is also sustained by the terrorist organisation HAMAS in Palestine. It runs annual summer camps, such as the ‘Vanguards of Liberation’ camps, where teenage boys receive weapons training from Qassam Brigades members alongside ideological indoctrination.

The official report on the Yazidi genocide by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (2016) states that ISIS sought to destroy the Yazidis in part by imposing measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion and the separation of men and women, and by transferring Yazidi children to the families of ISIS fighters, cutting them off from their faith.

A pamphlet circulated by ISIS in late 2014 laid down rules on female captives, including that a non-virgin captive’s ‘uterus must be purified’ (that is, shown not to be pregnant) before intercourse, and that an owner cannot sell a captive who has borne his child.

ISIS systematically separated women of childbearing age from older women, many of whom were killed, while keeping younger women and girls for enslavement.

The scale is staggering. In August 2014, ISIS abducted more than 6,000 Yazidis, most of them women and children, from Sinjar in Iraq. That same year, between 14-15 April, Boko Haram abducted 276 primarily Christian children in Chibok, Nigeria. Their parents said in July 2025 that 87 were still in captivity.

An estimated 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls a year are forcibly converted and married in Pakistan, according to a 2014 study by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace.

What happens when the targets are not captives in a war zone but schoolgirls in a democracy? One of the recent examples is the UK’s grooming gangs, where groups of men, overwhelmingly of British-Pakistani heritage, groomed, trafficked, raped, and abused girls (mostly white girls) as young as 11 over many years. Some commentators in Europe call it ‘rape-jihad’. The Alexis Jay Report (2014) as well as Baroness Casey Audit (2025), BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News suggest that it was systematically organised sexual exploitation of thousands of vulnerable young girls, predominantly white British, in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, and Huddersfield.

Further enquiries exposed organised child sexual exploitation via ‘friendship tactics’. In Rotherham alone, the Jay report conservatively estimated at least 1,400 victims between 1997 and 2013.

India has its own case files. In July 2025, the UP Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Jalaluddin alias Chhangur Baba on charges of running a conversion racket. The Enforcement Directorate says about Rs 106 crore, mostly from the Middle East, passed through 40 accounts linked to him and his associates, and the state’s ADG for law and order said the gang had operated for 15 years. Investigators described a ‘caste-based rate card’ pricing non-Muslim women: Brahmin/Sikh/Kshatriya women at Rs 15–16 lakh, OBC women at Rs 10–12 lakh, and others at Rs 8–10 lakh. Jalaluddin denies the charges.

If this is propaganda, I wonder what the truth would look like.

Why do families find it so hard to get their daughters back? At the intersection of personal laws and child protection statutes, young girls from non-Muslim backgrounds, particularly from Dalit, Tribal and other socio-economically vulnerable categories, often become trapped in complex legal battles. When parents seek to ‘revert’ or rescue their minor daughters from alleged grooming or forced conversion, they frequently face obstacles under Muslim personal law, which traditionally recognises marriage upon attaining puberty (presumed at 15 years or even earlier in classical interpretations).

This creates tension with secular laws such as the POCSO Act (which sets the age of consent at 18) and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act. Critics argue this legal grey area is exploited to shield predatory behaviour, with some claiming the relationship has ‘nothing to do with love jihad’. A parallel trend can be observed in Hyderabad, where police have repeatedly broken up rackets of ‘contract marriages’ between Gulf visitors and much younger local girls.

The pattern reaches beyond marriage, to land. In tribal-belt areas, non-tribal individuals, including Bangladeshi infiltrators and Muslim men, are accused of deliberately forming romantic ties with tribal women, leading to conversion. Once converted, the allegation goes, women are pressured to enable land transfers, mining leases, or property sales to Muslim entities, bypassing laws like the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908). BJP leaders and some tribal groups call this ‘land jihad’, though when Scroll checked one such list of cases in Sahibganj in 2024, it found several of the claims to be false.

On 15 January 2026, the Zanskar Buddhist Association wrote to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Zanskar Sub-Division. Its letter highlighted the cases of missing Buddhist girls from Zanskar region, especially the case of a missing Buddhist girl feared to have been wrongfully confined for conversion. The Zanskar Buddhist Association demanded a strict anti-conversion law to curb what they described as ‘Love Jihad’ in Ladakh.

In the letter, ZBA alleged that Buddhist girls were being systematically targeted through deception, inducement, and fraudulent conversions, often under the guise of love and marriage. They highlighted the one-sided nature of these conversions, where only the Buddhist girl converts to Islam.

The association warned that such organised patterns posed a serious threat to communal harmony and demanded immediate rescue of the girl along with stringent legal safeguards against forced or deceptive conversions. Sikh leaders in Jammu and Kashmir have made similar complaints, protesting the conversion and marriage of Sikh women.

Portrayed as ‘love’, some of these operations, investigators allege, are organised and funded from abroad.

At the heart of this pattern lies a specific ideological framework – The Jihadist doctrine. This doctrine treats women as primary strategic assets for demographic and ideological expansion: bearing and raising mujahideen for the caliphate. A 2015 manifesto by ISIS’s all-female al-Khansaa Brigade put women’s first duty as wives and mothers of the next generation.

This framework manifests across continents. Iran’s clerical regime has made population growth state policy, with Khamenei’s 2014 General Policies on Population urging higher birth rates. This phenomenon is called ‘population jihad’ in India.

Jihadists draw on a division Dr BR Ambedkar described in ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’: Muslim canon law, he wrote, divides the world into Dar-ul-Islam (House of Islam: territories under Islamic rule and Sharia law) and Dar-ul-Harb (House of War: territories considered hostile to Islam). Some jurists add a third, Dar al-Aman, where Muslims may live in peace under agreement.

In the jihadist reading, establishing Sharia over the world is a divine obligation, to be pursued by three methods: rapid mass conversion of non-Muslims (dawah), reproduction through converted and Muslim women, or physical jihad.

The camps in northeast Syria show how far it goes. In 2023, officials at al-Hol and Roj told the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism that ISIS women were pressuring boys as young as 13 into sex to produce children for the caliphate.

If the doctrine is old, the recruiting ground is new.

SECULAR URBAN YOUTH remain vulnerable to online radicalisation, which often begins with moral and social justice appeals and ends in jihadist recruitment.

The process exploits social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram. Algorithms guide vulnerable youth, especially liberals, atheists, and secular Muslims, to ‘revert’ testimonies framed as liberation and brotherhood. The Gaza war accelerated this sharply. Viral #FreePalestine and #AllEyesOnGaza videos framed the conflict as a Western-Zionist-Hindutva assault on Islam, turning solidarity activism into a pipeline for viewing jihad as a moral duty. A 2025 survey by Britain’s Institute for the Impact of Faith in Life found that global conflicts were the most common reason converts gave for turning to Islam, cited by one in five.

Salafi-jihadi influencers repackage these testimonies with Qur’anic verses and revenge calls, while portraying groups like Hamas, LeT, JeM, and JKLF as ‘freedom fighters’ for Palestine and Kashmir alike.

The radicalisation process follows this pattern: delegitimise the target’s native faith and community (as the sequel depicts, through forced beef consumption), groom with utopian promises of justice and afterlife rewards, alienate from family and culture, and then recycle the converted to erode non-Muslim communities and political structures.

In recent developments, terror groups have been building women’s wings, using women as low-suspicion assets. In April 2026, Andhra Pradesh police arrested Sayeeda Begum of Hyderabad in a multi-state operation.

She allegedly headed ‘Khawateen’, the women’s wing of Al Malik Islamic Youth, a module police linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, and was tasked with recruiting and radicalising women. Police moved to arrest about a dozen suspects in the same module.

This case further dismantles the ‘poverty porn’ narrative often used to explain terrorism against one’s nation and citizens. White-collar terrorism is not new in jihadist organisations. From its inception, groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and JeM have actively preferred recruits from educated backgrounds, especially those with degrees in STEM and Humanities.

Notable examples include Ayman al-Zawahiri, a qualified surgeon who became Al-Qaeda’s leader; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who studied Mechanical Engineering and masterminded the 9/11 attacks; Mohammed Atta, who held a Master’s in Urban Planning and led the 9/11 hijackers; and Anwar al-Awlaki, who earned degrees in Civil Engineering and Education. This pattern was starkly visible in the November 2025 Red Fort blast case, in which investigators accuse Dr Shaheen Shahid, a former medical college lecturer, of being tasked with setting up Jaish-e-Mohammed’s women’s wing, within a network that included other doctors.

While the absolute numbers remain limited, there have been several documented cases of students and alumni from premier institutions being arrested for links with ISIS and other jihadi outfits. In 2024, Tauseef Ali Farooqui, a 4th-year Bioscience student at IIT Guwahati, was arrested after pledging allegiance to ISIS on social media and attempting to join the group.

In 2023, Shahnawaz Alam, a B.Tech graduate in Mining Engineering from NIT Nagpur, was arrested in the Pune-Delhi ISIS module for his involvement in IED fabrication and terror financing. Multiple arrests have also taken place involving students and alumni from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and other engineering colleges, where individuals were radicalised online and charged with pro-ISIS activities or planning to join terror groups.

That leaves the third question: if the pattern is real and reaches far beyond Kerala, why is it denied?

WHEN THE PATTERN affects Yazidis or British schoolgirls, the world responds with award-winning documentaries. Dramas such as Caliphate (2020) and Black Crows (2017) are on major streaming platforms, and documentaries including Sabaya (2021), On Her Shoulders (2018, on Nadia Murad) and Escaping ISIS (2015) are treated as factual, honourable works that mourn the suffering of victims.

But, what is disheartening to see is that, when the same pattern is called out in Indian socio-political discourse, it becomes the highest form of ‘political blasphemy’. Actually, when some people aren’t able to speak the truth, they find ways not to speak it at all. Political dishonesty becomes one tool out of many available in the politicians’ box of excuses, across all parties.

The Kerala Story and its 2026 sequel, which address identical patterns, face allegations of being ‘propaganda’. The issue is not whether every instance conforms to a single narrative. It is why documented cases are systematically and aggressively dismissed, particularly when they involve the victimisation of majoritarian women.

Discrediting, insulting, mocking (through the ‘beef protest’), and blaming victims, all framed as a response to majoritarian politics, reflects a familiar pattern.

A similar drill accompanied The Kashmir Files.

Denial is not neutral. It is politically motivated and selective. It is to get some votes and to win a seat. To rise in one community’s eyes, while not leaving another community to raise their eyes even for a second is sheer inhumane behaviour.

Protecting minor girls, young boys and women across communities requires sincerity beyond political convenience. India’s diversity cannot survive if national political parties ignore these recurring threats.

Any ideology that seeks to reshape India’s demographic and political landscape through force, organised grooming, or covert networks must be recognised for what it is: a national security threat.

Denial does not foster harmony. It ensures that the cycle continues: unseen, unrecognised, and unchallenged.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct some figures and names.