Author: Shah Um E Habiba
Introduction: When the Screen Becomes a Weapon
There is a particular kind of horror in seeing your own face do something you never did. Imagine finding a video of yourself saying things you never said, appearing in places you never visited. The video looks real. Your friends are forwarding it. And no matter how loudly you say it is false, the image is already out there, moving at the speed of the internet.
This is not a hypothetical. In November 2023, a digitally manipulated video featuring the face of Indian actress Rashmika Mandanna spread rapidly across social media. It was a deepfake, fabricated entirely using Artificial Intelligence, yet convincing enough to fool thousands at first glance. Actor Amitabh Bachchan demanded legal accountability. Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the alarm publicly. That moment forced India to ask a question it had been avoiding: do our laws actually protect citizens from this kind of digital crime? The uncomfortable answer is that they do not. Not yet.
What Exactly Is a Deepfake?
The word combines deep learning, a form of advanced AI, with the word fake. Using this technology, a person’s face can be placed onto someone else’s body in a video. A voice can be cloned with just a few seconds of original audio. Entire speeches or intimate videos can be manufactured from scratch, and the result can look terrifyingly real.
A deepfake is essentially a lie that looks like the truth. And creating one no longer requires a studio or technical expertise. Several mobile applications allow users to fabricate convincing synthetic videos in minutes, often for free. While the technology has legitimate uses in cinema and education, a large and growing share of deepfake content is being created purely to harm, humiliate, or deceive.
India’s Legal Framework: Patchwork Stitched Together
India has no law that specifically defines or criminalises deepfakes. What exists instead is a collection of older laws stretched to cover some parts of the problem, but not all of it, and not effectively.
The Information Technology Act of 2000 contains relevant provisions. Section 66E punishes the publication of private images without consent. Sections 67 and 67A criminalise electronically published obscene or sexually explicit content. These can technically apply to deepfake pornography, but the law was written before deepfakes existed and it shows. The definitions are narrow, the process is slow, and the burden of proof is heavy.
India’s new criminal code, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023, includes provisions on defamation, harassment, and sexual offences that could be applied to some deepfake cases. A fabricated video damaging someone’s reputation might attract defamation charges. Non consensual deepfake pornography could fall under voyeurism or sexual harassment provisions. But these are workarounds, not solutions. The law does not speak directly to synthetic media.
The IT Intermediary Guidelines of 2021 do require social media platforms to remove non consensual intimate imagery within 24 hours of a complaint. This is a meaningful rule, but enforcement remains inconsistent. Platforms tend to act only after significant public pressure rather than as a matter of routine.
The Government’s Response: Advisories, But No Law Yet
After the 2023 controversy, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued advisories reminding platforms of their obligations and signalling that new legislation was being considered. India’s upcoming Digital India Act is expected to include dedicated provisions on AI generated content. Legal experts have pushed for this Act to define deepfakes clearly, mandate labelling of synthetic media, create fast track remedies for victims, and impose criminal penalties on creators as well as distributors of harmful content.
As of early 2025, the Digital India Act is still being drafted. Victims continue to file complaints under whichever existing laws come closest, and courts are left to interpret provisions that were never written for this kind of harm.
Who Bears the Cost of This Legal Gap?
It is rarely the powerful who suffer most when the law falls short. Research consistently shows that the vast majority of harmful deepfake content online is non consensual pornography, and almost all of it targets women. In India, this carries additional social weight. A woman whose image has been manipulated and shared does not just suffer emotional trauma. She risks her career, her relationships, and her reputation. The harm is not only digital. It is deeply personal and often permanent.
Politicians, journalists, and activists are also being targeted. Fabricated audio of a political leader making inflammatory remarks can trigger real world tensions in a country as diverse as India. Ahead of the 2024 General Elections, the Election Commission flagged AI generated political content as a serious threat to the democratic process. A voter who watches a fake video of a candidate confessing to corruption may cast their ballot based on something that never happened.
What the Rest of the World Has Done
India does not need to start from scratch. The United States passed the DEFIANCE Act in 2024, giving victims of non consensual deepfake pornography the right to sue creators in federal civil court. The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act of 2023 made sharing deepfake sexual images a criminal offence, targeting not just creators but anyone who knowingly spreads the content. The European Union’s AI Act, which came into force in 2024, requires all deepfake content to be clearly labelled as AI generated. South Korea went further, directly criminalising the creation and distribution of deepfake pornography under its sexual violence laws.
Each of these approaches is different, but all share one recognition: deepfakes are a distinct legal problem and they require a distinct legal solution.
Conclusion: The Law Must Catch Up to the Lie
Technology has always moved faster than the law. What is new is the scale and the intimacy of the harm that deepfakes cause. A statute written in the year 2000 was never designed for a world where a person’s face and voice could be stolen in minutes and turned into a weapon against them.
India has the legal tradition, the judicial capacity, and the democratic mandate to respond to this challenge. What it needs now is the will to act. A clear standalone law defining deepfakes, creating accessible remedies for victims, holding platforms to genuine accountability, and requiring transparency in AI generated content is not an ambitious ask. It is a basic requirement of justice in the digital age.
The fight against deepfakes is, at its core, a fight for truth. And truth has always been worth defending.
