Tovino Thomas leads voter turnout as Kerala polls heat up
Actor Tovino Thomas casts his vote in Thrissur as Kerala records impressive voter turnout. Key constituencies see fierce electoral battles in the second phase of Lok Sabha elections.
Even as ‘The Kerala Story’ is doing brisk business after courts refused to stay the film’s screenings, the allegations of 32,000 women going missing from the southern state has boomeranged on BJP’s flagship state Gujarat.
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, accessed by journalists in the wake of ‘The Kerala Story’ controversy, has revealed that at least 41,000 women have gone missing from Gujarat during the last five years.
While producers of ‘The Kerala Story’ did not attribute the figure 32,000 to any authentic source and drastically cut down the number to just three, Gujarat has no option to deny the number of missing women as it is straight from the NCRB, an institution under the control of what is better known as ‘double engine’ government.
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Ironically, the figures of missing women from Gujarat pertain to the years 2016 to 2020 when the BJP’s ‘model state’ was under the spell of the much touted ‘double engine’.
In ‘The Kerala Story’, the missing women – whether 32,000 or just 3 – have been taken away and exploited by ‘Islamic terrorists’, but Gujarat’s women have been trafficked into flesh trade and domestic slaves by indigenous gangs.
Of a total 41,621 women gone missing from Gujarat between 2016 and 2020, the highest number was in 2019 when 9,268 went missing.
Even during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic brought in the lockdown and general restrictions movements, as many as 8,290 women were trafficked from Gujarat, the NCRB data revealed.
However, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is organising special screenings of ‘The Kerala Story’ at different places in Gujarat to “spread awareness” about how girls go missing. One such screening here on Sunday was attended by Hindutva activist Kajal Hindustani who was arrested last month for her hate speech in Una during the Ramnavami procession.
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