More than a year has passed since the Uttarakhand assembly elections and the political situation in the state has turned aggressive. The new flashpoint is not a rally or a policy announcement, but a viral video purportedly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) targeting senior Congress leader and former chief minister Harish Rawat.
The controversy centers on a video that uses Rawat's voice and an AI avatar to portray him as a “spy” and accuse him of placating Muslims. In the video, Rawat uses phrases such as “Muslim Sharnam Gachami”, “Mazar Sharnam Gachami” and “Love Jihad Sharnam Gachami”, which are said to suggest religious appeasement.
Rawat claimed that the video was fabricated and malicious.
The video caused a political uproar. Mr. Rawat is planning to march towards the Bharatiya Janata Party's state headquarters in Dehradun to protest against deliberate attempts to defame him. Police barricaded the area and halted the march, but a tense exchange occurred with members of Congress.
Rawat then sat on a road dharna and accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of using AI to spread falsehoods to mislead voters. Slogans were raised against the BJP government. “I am not a spy. Either they (Bharatiya Janata Party) will prove that I am a spy or I will apologize. Such tactics are used every time before elections to spread false stories and confuse the people,” Rawat said during the sit-in protest. “We will not back down until the truth comes out.”
Rawat also filed a complaint with the police in Dehradun. In his complaint, he alleged that an AI-generated derogatory video was uploaded on a social media handle run by the Uttarakhand unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its associates on December 18. He claimed the video portrayed him as an anti-national figure and was aimed at tarnishing his public image and stirring up religious sentiments.
A First Information Report (FIR) was registered against unknown social media users under the provisions of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Information Technology (IT) Act.
The incident reignited a war of words between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. In a social media post, Rawat accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of orchestrating a coordinated campaign to brand him a traitor. “You speak in unison from top to bottom. You do not produce any evidence when questioned. You paint me like a Pakistani spy through your secret social media handles and even incite violence against me,” he wrote, demanding a public apology if no evidence is produced.
Rawat also linked this episode to his previous election campaigns and claimed that similar allegations were leveled against him in the 2017 and 2022 assembly polls. He recalled that the Bharatiya Janata Party had granted Namaz holiday on Friday and accused the Congress-led government of spreading the claim of setting up an Islamic university in Uttarakhand.
At a campaign rally ahead of the 2022 elections, Union home minister Amit Shah accused the previous Congress government in Rawat's government of allowing highways to be closed due to namaz and promising to set up an Islamic university. These allegations received widespread attention despite repeated denials by the Congress and Rawat.
Many political observers believe that the discourse around appeasement politics had a negative impact on the 2022 Congress and helped strengthen the Bharatiya Janata Party's position. Similar themes have re-emerged, now amplified through AI-generated content, suggesting that identity-based messaging may once again play a central role in the run-up to the next poll.
The BJP rejected the Congress' charges. Manveer Singh Chouhan, the BJP's state media in-charge, said Rawat's protest was politically motivated and reflected distrust in the legal process. He pointed out that Rawat had filed a police complaint the day before and expressed confidence in the law, but the next day he attempted to march to the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters.
“This is not a coincidence. It is a well-thought-out political strategy,” Chouhan said. He claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party did not create or share the controversial video and had nothing to do with it. Mr. Chouhan added that the two parties had agreed to remove mutually objectionable content from social media platforms, but maintained that the specific video cited by Mr. Rawat was not associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Mr. Chouhan accused Mr. Rawat of attacking the Bharatiya Janata Party because he saw it as an obstacle to what he called the Congress' politics of appeasement. While acknowledging the ideological differences between the two parties, he added that political opposition should remain within democratic bounds and that the Bharatiya Janata Party would respond to complaints through legal means.
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