#FactCheck - Assam Video Falsely Shared as BJP Government Deporting Bangladeshis From West Bengal

Introduction‍

In a significant step, the Indian Army beefed up its information warfare capacity on June 25, 2026, with the operationalisation of @MythbusterXX, its dedicated fact-checking handle designed to counter any form of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and deepfakes on the army swiftly. Adopting the motto 'Verify Before You Amplify,' the service seeks to pivot from reactive statements to active cognitive warfare. In a milieu where manipulated narratives can be as decisive in shaping public perception as kinetic force is on the battlefield, truth itself has transformed into a critical national security objective. 

This is clear proof that protecting India’s digital battleground will from now on be defined not just by troop deployments but also by its institutional verification capacities, swift attribution mechanisms, and public awareness.

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When the Battlefield Went Digital‍

Today warfare extends to timelines, group chats, and prime-time graphics packages. The distinction between misinformation , disinformation , and malinformation is crucial to operations. After all, they necessitate different types of counters. Generative AI just exponentially increased their velocity, cost, and the creepy believability of synthesized audio, video, and images. Operation Sindoor, India's May 2025 military response to a Pahalgam terror attack, provides a blueprint for just how large it can get.

According to the fact-checking site BOOM, 68% of fact checks in May related to Operation Sindoor, describing the campaign as a misinformation superspreader, and, more directly, India's Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan lamented at last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue that roughly 15% of his military’s operational time was spent on countering false news. New Delhi matched this response level; the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had blocked over 1,400 URLs, many bearing false information or communally inciteful narratives from accounts in Pakistan. These challenges won't be vanishing any time soon. Microsoft's July 2025 Digital Defence Report lists India among the top countries targeted for AI-powered state-backed hacking, noting the automation of attacks and generation of fake content used to influence opinion.

CyberPeace's regulatory tracking also indicates steps toward building infrastructure to mitigate this,  a Rule 7 complaint system for deepfakes, and efforts to foster local detection capabilities under the IndiaAI mission signal it's now an infrastructural threat.

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Why the Army Chose to Speak First

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On 1 June 2026, the Indian government’s official fact-checking unit debunked a deepfake of former Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth talking about India’s engagement with the Taliban that emanated from Pakistan-affiliated propaganda sources, appearing within days of a change of military command. Barely days after General Dhiraj Seth was elevated to Chief of Army Staff, the 31st person to hold the post, another fabricated deepfake used spliced authentic footage with AI-cloned audio to falsely allege he had blamed the past army leadership for hiding the bodies of soldiers to protect their image.

Such a dual targeting of India’s army chiefs with deepfakes in such close succession is a testament as to why an authoritative, constantly running fact-check machine isn’t an optional extra but a strategic must-have.

Architecture is as important as architecture itself. India tried a statutory fact-checking model with a government-owned Fact Check Unit under the Information Technology (IT) Rules of 2023 through the Press Information Bureau (PIB). It had to retreat from the edge of the constitutional cliff. In September 2024, when the Bombay High Court struck down key provisions of these rules. It ruled it unconstitutional to empower the state to declare digital content relating to the state itself as fake, false, or misleading. A similar reading of the analysis by CyberPeace found that digital speech should be given the same protections as offline speech, and this should be the benchmark for any counter-misinformation policy.

MythbusterXX carefully avoids the constitutional controversy by acting as an institutional avenue that produces verified information and rebuttals in response to disinformation. There is a profound distinction between answering falsehoods with factual, credible speech versus shutting them down with state power, the very proportionality that civil libertarians have said must govern a democracy's approach to online misinformation.

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Platforms as Accelerants, Not Just Conduits

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Part of the issue lies upstream, with the algorithms and broadcasters that favor speedy falsehood over careful confirmation. A month’s supply of “false and misleading stories,” the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism observed, streamed online within hours of Operation Sindoor's onset: one fact-checker identified approximately seventy false claims by the close of day one. Meanwhile, on the small screen, graphics depicting escalating conflicts were being televised, with broadcasters forced to scramble under 24/7 competition.

Amplified manipulation of the crisis narrative is also a factor; studies show that thousands of accounts have been reposting exactly the same party content for three years, making crisis-induced viral narratives predictable rather than organic phenomena. For the most part, the platforms that manage these narratives and the algorithms that direct content on both sides of the divide are not just innocent delivery systems.

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Digital Literacy as the First Line of Defence

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Institutional rebuttals only go so far if citizens lack the reflex to pause before sharing, which is where CyberPeace's own work becomes directly relevant. Through a multi-year, Google.org-backed initiative, CyberPeace Foundation aims to reach over 40 million Indian internet users, including 9 million underserved beneficiaries, through a multilingual resource centre offering 650 hours of content, state-level helplines, and quick-response teams staffed by digital forensics and fact-checking experts. Longer-running efforts such as the Digital Shakti campaign and the annual eRaksha competition, run with NCERT, have built a culture of responsible digital citizenship among young and first-time internet users since 2019, while CyberPeace Corps, the foundation's volunteer arm, carries the same message into classrooms and campuses through cyber-awareness sessions run with universities and school networks nationwide. Notably, CyberPeace's own research on children's online safety had already flagged manipulated Army-related videos as a category of digital manipulation designed to cast doubt on official military positions, well before @MythbusterXX existed. The Army's tagline and CyberPeace's mission converge on the same insight: verification is a civic skill, not merely an institutional service.

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A Season of Deepfakes

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The history book of compromised defence material in the past year alone would be edifying. The International Federation of Journalists recorded one such deepfake widely circulated that relied on AI voice cloning and lip-sync tools to present the Pakistani PM conceding defeat, though the video actually contained his praise for the Pakistani air force’s performance following Operation Sindoor. 

Other similar videos featured the Indian Prime Minister, External Affairs Minister, and Home Minister allegedly apologising to Pakistan and a deepfake with a foreign head of state in voice-cloned style applauding India’s armed forces. None needed a state’s resources, but just a laptop, voice cloning available readily, and a citizenry ready to spread rather than confirm the authenticity of any such sensational information before spreading it on to the masses.

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Building the Verification Reflex

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A resilient information ecosystem needs different actors playing complementary roles:

1. Citizens: Do not equate virality with credibility. Verify all national security-related information through official sources, such as @MythbusterXX, before reposting or forwarding it.
2. Journalists: Apply rigorous verification standards to live broadcasts, war-room graphics, and breaking reports, just as you would to print journalism, and avoid speculation during fast-moving military operations.
3. Researchers and fact-checkers: Use open-source forensic and AI-detection technologies to authenticate questionable material. BOOM researchers, for instance, used Deepfake-o-meter to scrutinize misleading videos of political leaders before fact-checking and publishing them.
4. Policymakers: Favored constitutionally proportional and carefully tailored regulations over broad-based takedown mandates. While the 2026 IT Amendment Rules require platforms to shift their obligations from compliance with takedowns towards preventive diligence on synthetic media, implementation should continue to be informed by judicial protections afforded to freedom of speech and due process.

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Cyber Resilience Is National Security Now

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Legal scholars examining Operation Sindoor have drawn a useful distinction between coordinated information warfare, which is strategic and intentional, and the diffuse, uncoordinated mis/disinformation that dominated timelines during the conflict, cautioning that disproportionate state responses to the latter can compromise citizens' right to know just as much as the falsehoods themselves. Getting that balance right, between speed and due process, between institutional voice and censorship, is the real test facing India's information ecosystem, in defence and far beyond it. CyberPeace has made a related argument in its own work on AI-enabled espionage: institutions such as the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre and the Defence Cyber Agency are already folding AI-based monitoring into their processes, yet no amount of institutional surveillance substitutes for a citizenry trained to spot manipulation on sight.

@MythbusterXX will not end deepfakes, and no single handle can. But it signals something CyberPeace has argued for years: resilience against synthetic and manipulated media requires authoritative institutional voices, digitally literate citizens, forensically equipped researchers, and proportionate policy, all pulling in the same direction. "Verify before you amplify" is not just an Army campaign. It is the operating discipline a democracy needs to protect its own information age.

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Conclusion

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@MythbusterXX can't possibly kill deepfakes and disinformation, but this marks a milestone shift towards developing an institutional resilience for India's info battlefield. For, after all, national security in the age of info warfare depends less on tech and more on robust institutions, constitutional balance in policymaking, responsible social platforms, and a citizenry that clicks "forward" only after clicking "verify."

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This piece is part of CyberPeace's ongoing work on misinformation, disinformation, and digital citizenship in India. For more on CyberPeace's initiatives in digital literacy and cyber resilience, visit cyberpeace.org.

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Key Sources

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• Dynamite News, "Indian Army launches fact-check push against deepfake videos and fake military claims" (June 2026)
• ADG PI – Indian Army, official announcement on X (@adgpi)
• Press Information Bureau, Government of India, press release on countering misinformation during Operation Sindoor
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, "Truth is the casualty: How Indian fact-checkers debunked false claims during the India-Pakistan crisis"
• International Federation of Journalists, "AI, Deepfakes, and the Fog of War" and "Operation Sindoor and the Two Wars" (June 2025)
• Republic World, "Operation Sindoor Haunts Pakistan: Islamabad's Latest AI Deepfake Bid Against Indian Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth Exposed" (July 2026)
• TechPolicy Press, "Sanity Prevails as Bombay High Court Strikes Down India Government's Fact Check Unit", and LiveLaw, coverage of the tie-breaker verdict, on the IT Amendment Rules, 2023 (Fact-Check Unit)
• Dark Reading, "Indian Army Propaganda Spread by 1.4K AI-Powered Social Media Accounts"
• Inforrm, "(Dis)information warfare and the right to know: lessons from Operation Sindoor"
• CyberPeace Foundation, initiatives page and The CyberPeace Initiative (Google.org-backed digital literacy programme)
• CyberPeace Foundation, "AI-Powered Espionage: How India's Cybersecurity Strategy Must Evolve"
• CyberPeace Foundation, "From Deepfakes to Due Diligence – Decoding India's IT Amendment Rules"
• Wikipedia, CyberPeace Foundation (background on Digital Shakti and eRaksha)

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Introduction

India plans to draft the first AI regulations framework. The draft will be discussed and debated in June-July this year as stated by Union Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajeev Chandrasekhar. He aims to harness AI for economic growth, healthcare, and agriculture, ensuring its significant impact. The Indian government plans to fully utilise AI for economic growth, focusing on healthcare, drug discovery, agriculture, and farmer productivity. 

Government Approach to Regulating AI 

Chandrasekhar stated that the government's approach to AI regulation involves establishing principles and a comprehensive list of harms and criminalities. They prefer clear platform standards to address bias and misuse during model training rather than regulating AI at specific stages of its development. Union Minister Chandrasekhar also highlights the importance of legal compliance and the risks faced by entrepreneurs who disregard regulations in the digital economy. He warned of "severe consequences" for non-compliance. 

Addressing the opening session of the two-day Nasscom leadership summit in Mumbai, the Union minister added that the intention is to harness AI for economic growth and address potential risks and harms. Mr. Chandrasekhar stated that the government is committed to developing AI-skilled individuals. He also highlighted the importance of a global governance framework that deals with the safety and trust of AI.

Union Minister Chandrasekhar also said that 900 million Indians online and 1.3 billion people will be connected to the global internet soon, providing India with both an opportunity and a responsibility to collaborate on regulations to establish legal safeguards that protect consumers and citizens. He further added that the framework is being retrofitted to address the complexity and impact of AI in safety infrastructure. The goal is to ensure legal guardrails for Al, a kinetic enabler of the digital economy, safety and trust, and accountability for those using the AI platform.

Prioritizing Safety and Trust in AI Development

Union minister Chandrasekhar announced that the framework will be discussed at the upcoming Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) event, a multi-stakeholder initiative with 29 member countries aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practice on AI by supporting research on AI-related priorities. Chandrasekhar emphasises the importance of safety and trust in generative AI development. He believes that every platform must be legally accountable for any harm it causes or enables and should not enable criminality. He advocated for safe and trustworthy AI.

Conclusion

India is drafting its first AI regulation framework, as highlighted by Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. This framework aims to harness the potential of AI while ensuring safety, trust, and accountability. The framework will focus on principles, comprehensive standards, and legal compliance to navigate the complexities of AI's impact on sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and the digital economy. India recognises the need for robust legal safeguards to protect citizens and foster innovation and economic growth while fostering a culture of trustworthy AI development.

References:

• https://www.livemint.com/ai/artificial-intelligence/india-to-come-up-with-ai-regulations-framework-by-june-july-this-year-rajeev-chandrasekhar-msde-11708409300377.html
• https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-to-develop-draft-ai-framework-by-june-july-chandrasekhar/articleshow/107865548.cms
• https://newsonair.gov.in/News?title=Government-to-come-out-with-draft-regulatory-framework-for-Artificial-Intelligence-by-July-2024&id=477637

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Executive Summary

A video featuring former Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar is being widely circulated on social media with the date “12-5-2026” displayed on the screen. In the viral clip, Tendulkar appears to promote an investment scheme, allegedly saying that people investing in the scheme today could earn Rs 80 lakh by the end of the day. Throughout the video, he is seen speaking about investment opportunities and financial returns. However, research conducted by CyberPeace Research Wing found that the video is AI-generated and misleading. The original footage was actually from an event marking the centenary celebrations of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

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Claim

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A Facebook user shared the viral video on May 12, 2026, claiming that Sachin Tendulkar was endorsing a high-return investment scheme. The post quickly gained traction on social media platforms.

• https://www.facebook.com/1999330190535884/videos/985146933916502 

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Fact Check

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To verify the claim, we searched the internet using relevant keywords but found no credible media reports suggesting that Tendulkar had endorsed any such investment scheme. As part of our research, we extracted key frames from the viral clip and conducted a reverse image search. During the search, we found the original video uploaded on November 19, 2025, on the YouTube channel of IANS. According to the video description, Tendulkar was attending an event organized to mark the centenary year celebrations of Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTDCg_kTIV4 

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We further found a similar version of the same video uploaded on November 19, 2025, on the official Facebook page of Times Now, confirming that the footage was unrelated to any investment or financial scheme.

• https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1379249700417851

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Conclusion

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Our research found that the viral video has been manipulated using AI-generated audio or editing techniques to falsely portray Sachin Tendulkar promoting an investment scheme. The original video was from a public event related to Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s centenary celebrations and had no connection to any financial investment platform.

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