Edited clip of Indian politician misleads online during crucial elections
- Published on November 11, 2025 at 09:37
- 3 min read
- By Sachin BAGHEL, AFP India
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As India held local elections in key state Bihar, a manipulated video supposedly showing opposition party leader Prashant Kishor apologising to a ruling party politician circulated online. The audio of the clip was flagged "likely AI-generated" by a voice-cloning detection tool, and the reporter who interviewed Kishor told AFP he made no such remarks.
"Prashant Pandey apologises to Kushwaha community," reads Hindi text superimposed on a Facebook reel that circulated mid-October.
Prashant Pandey, popularly known as Prashant Kishor, is a political strategist-turned-politician (archived link).
He founded the Jan Suraaj Party that aims to wrest power in Bihar from the ruling alliance that includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party.
The eastern state, India's third most populous, began voting on November 6, with results expected on November 14.
The video shows Kishor speaking into a journalist's microphone from a car, with the Hindi-language audio playing.
"All allegations I made against Samrat Chaudhary are baseless. I committed this despicable act to undermine his popularity," he appears to say.
"I apologise to Samrat Chaudhary and the entire Kushwaha community."
Samrat Chaudhary, leader of the ruling BJP and deputy chief minister of Bihar, belongs to the marginalised Kushwaha community -- a major vote bank in the state (archived link).
Kishor has frequently attacked Chaudhary during his campaign, accusing the latter of a criminal past and raising questions on his education qualifications (archived link).
The edited video also appeared on Facebook and Instagram.
Comments from users saying Prashant Kishor was "shown his place" suggest they believed the video to be genuine.
"So you are in your limits now," one user commented. Another user wrote: "Kushwaha power".
'Very likely AI-generated'
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip found its longer version uploaded on the YouTube channel of local media outlet Live Cities on October 11, 2025 (archived link).
The video titled "Prashant Kishor received a grand welcome in Tejashwi Yadav's Raghopur" shows the politician interacting with a journalist.
The portion of the YouTube video between the 10:15 and 10:26 mark appears to have been clipped, edited and shared in false posts.
In the original YouTube interview, Kishor says in Hindi: "People of Bihar can now see that in a society where votes were cast in name of caste and hollow promises of social justice, those who received the votes rose to power, while children of voters still struggle as labourers."
There is no mention of Chaudhary or the Kushwaha community throughout the video.
AFP contacted journalist Samreen Fatma from Live Cities who said the clip was manipulated (archived link).
"He did not say anything about Samrat Chaudhary or the Kushwaha community during the interview," Fatma told AFP on October 25.
AFP extracted the audio fragment from the clip, removed the background music and ran it through the Hiya voice-cloning detection tool within the Verification Plugin, also known as InVID-WeVerify, which assessed it was "very likely AI-generated" (archived link).
AFP has previously debunked misinformation stemming from AI-generated voice cloning, and false narratives around the Bihar elections.
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