Algorithms love a good fight. It’s the easiest way to keep your eyes glued to a screen that’s slowly melting your brain. So, it wasn’t exactly a shock when Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan took to the podium to denounce The Kerala Story 2. He called it a "threat to secularism." He called it "false propaganda." He’s not wrong, but he’s also playing right into the hands of a marketing machine that treats outrage like high-octane fuel.
We’ve seen this script before. The first film was a low-budget lightning rod that turned a handful of questionable data points into a national fever dream. Now comes the sequel. It’s the same old sludge, repackaged for a digital ecosystem that rewards the loudest, most divisive voice in the room. Vijayan’s critique is sharp, focusing on how the film portrays the state as some sort of breeding ground for extremism. But in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, a "threat to secularism" is just another trending hashtag. It’s a click. It’s a share. It’s a reason to argue with your cousin on WhatsApp at three in the morning.
The friction here isn't just about history or religion; it’s about the cost of maintaining a civil society when the tools we use to communicate are designed to burn it down. Think about the overhead. Every time a film like this drops, the state has to dump millions of rupees into additional security, digital monitoring, and damage control. That’s a real price tag. It’s a tax on peace, paid for by people who just want to go to work without worrying about a riot breaking out over a cinema screen.
Vijayan’s frustration is palpable. He’s looking at a piece of media designed to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of truth and land directly in the lizard brains of a polarized electorate. "They are spreading false propaganda," he says. Of course they are. That’s the business model. In the modern attention economy, accuracy is an expensive luxury that doesn't scale. Rage, however, scales beautifully. It’s cheap to produce and even cheaper to distribute.
The CM is fighting a ghost in the machine. You can ban a film, or you can condemn it from a high-backed chair in Thiruvananthapuram, but you can’t stop the pixels from migrating. This isn’t the 1970s. You don’t need a theater to start a fire. You just need a few thousand bot accounts and a narrative that confirms everyone’s worst fears. The film’s creators know this. They aren't selling art; they’re selling a feeling of victimhood. And in India’s current political climate, victimhood is the most valuable currency on the market.
It’s easy to get lost in the "secularism" debate, but let’s look at the tech. The platforms hosting the discourse around The Kerala Story 2 don’t care if the movie is true. They don’t care if Kerala is a model of communal harmony or a ticking time bomb. They care about dwell time. They care about how many times you hit the "angry" emoji. Every time Vijayan speaks out, he gives the film a fresh SEO boost. It’s a symbiotic relationship between the politician who needs a villain and the filmmaker who needs a martyr.
The trade-off is grim. We’ve traded a shared reality for a series of curated hallucinations. Vijayan is trying to defend a version of Kerala that is built on pluralism and social cohesion, but he’s doing it in an arena where those concepts are seen as bugs, not features. The film isn’t interested in the nuances of Keralite culture. It’s interested in the "Them vs. Us" narrative that keeps the ad revenue flowing and the base energized.
So, the CM issues his warnings. The IT cells sharpen their memes. The rest of us are left to sift through the wreckage of a public discourse that feels more like a dumpster fire every day. We’re being fed a steady diet of high-fructose grievance, and we’re surprised when the body politic starts to rot.
If this film is indeed a threat to secularism, it’s only because secularism requires a level of patience and nuance that our current digital infrastructure has effectively priced out of the market. We’ve built a world where the truth is too slow and lies are too profitable to ignore.
How much is a functioning democracy actually worth if the cheapest way to win an election is to convince half the country that the other half is trying to destroy them?