Congress welcomes SC stay on WB govt’s ban on ‘Kerala Story’

The Congress in West Bengal Thursday welcomed the Supreme Court’s stay on the state government’s order banning the screening of the film ‘The Kerala Story’. Welcoming the apex court’s verdict, the leader of the party in Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury Thursday said he has himself watched the film and found it ”full of exaggerations”. ”The subject it portrays can be handled in better ways than restricting the film,” he said. Besides, a ban on films at the theatres or imposing restrictions on showing it is next to impossible in the modern digital age, Chowdhury, who is also the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee president, said. Bengal was the first state to ban the film. Its plot follows the story a group of women from Kerala who are converted to Islam and join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The film is premised on the theory of ‘love jihad’ and claims that thousands of women from Kerala are being converted to Islam and recruited in the terror group Islamic State (IS).