#FactCheck: Edited Broadcast Misused to Spread False Assam Political Rift Claim
Executive Summary:
A video from an India TV news show related to the Assam elections is going viral on social media. In the clip, anchor Meenakshi Joshi is allegedly seen claiming that there is a rift between the BJP and the RSS in Assam. The video further suggests that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi stating that former Congress members have taken over the BJP, and that RSS volunteers would not work for the party in Assam. However, a research by the CyberPeace found that the viral video is edited and misleading. The original video contains no such claims.
Claim:
A social media user Ajit Singh shared the video on X with the caption:“The core idea of today’s BJP is to capture power by any means. We have been saying this for long, and now even RSS has accepted that BJP in Assam has been taken over by Congress mindset.”
Fact Check:
To verify the claim, we searched relevant keywords about the alleged letter by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, we found no credible media reports supporting this claim. We then checked the YouTube channel of India TV but could not find the viral clip there. During the search, we did find a similar video from Meenakshi Joshi’s show. In the beginning of that video, the portion seen in the viral clip appears.
In the original video, the anchor is discussing the announcement of election dates in five states. There is no mention of any rift between the BJP and RSS in Assam.
Conclusion:
The viral India TV video claiming a rift between the BJP and RSS in Assam is edited and misleading. The original broadcast was about election dates in five states and did not include any such claims.
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The Delhi High Court vide order dated 21st November 2024 directed the Centre to nominate members for a committee constituted to examine the issue of deepfakes. The court was informed by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) that a committee had been formed on 20 November 2024 on deepfake matters. The Delhi High Court passed an order while hearing two writ petitions against the non-regulation of deepfake technology in the country and the threat of its potential misuse. The Centre submitted that it was actively taking measures to address and mitigate the issues related to deepfake technology. The court directed the central government to nominate the members within a week.
The court further stated that the committee shall examine and take into consideration the suggestions filed by the petitioners and consider the regulations as well as statutory frameworks in foreign countries like the European Union. The court has directed the committee to invite the experiences and suggestions of stakeholders such as intermediary platforms, telecom service providers, victims of deepfakes, and websites which provide and deploy deepfakes. The counsel for the petitioners stated that delay in the creation, detection and removal of deepfakes is causing immense hardship to the public at large. Further, the court has directed the said committee to submit its report, as expeditiously as possible, preferably within three months. The matter is further listed on 24th March 2025.
CyberPeace Outlook
Through the issue of misuse of deepfakes by bad actors, it has become increasingly difficult for users to differentiate between genuine and altered content created by deepfakes. This increasing misuse has led to a rise in cyber crimes and poses dangers to users' privacy. Bad actors use any number of random pictures or images collected from the internet to create such non-consensual deepfake content. Such deepfake videos further pose risks of misinformation and fake news campaigns with the potential to sway elections, cause confusion and mistrust in authorities, and more.
The conceivable legislation governing the deepfake is the need of the hour. It is important to foster regulated, ethical and responsible consumption of technology. The comprehensive legislation governing the issue can help ensure technology can be used in a better manner. The dedicated deepfake regulation and deploying ethical practices through a coordinated approach by concerned stakeholders can effectively manage the problems presented by the misuse of deepfake technology. Legal frameworks in this regard need to be equipped to handle the challenges posed by deepfake and AI. Accountability in AI is also a complex issue that requires comprehensive legal reforms. The government should draft policies and regulations that balance innovation and regulation. Through a multifaceted approach and comprehensive regulatory landscape, we can mitigate the risks posed by deepfakes and safeguard privacy, trust, and security in the digital age.
References
- https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/law-order/3168452-delhi-high-court-calls-for-action-on-deepfake-regulation
- https://images.assettype.com/barandbench/2024-11-23/w63zribm/Chaitanya_Rohilla_vs_Union_of_India.pdf
Executive Summary
A video is rapidly going viral on social media, with the claim that transgender women assaulted an Indian Army officer in Thailand. The post further claims that the officer had failed to pay the agreed amount, following which the incident took place. A research by CyberPeace’s research wing found that the viral video is fake. In fact, the video shows an incident that took place in Pattaya, Thailand, in December 2025. The 52-year-old Indian national, Raj Jasuja, was allegedly assaulted by a group of transgender women following a dispute over payment for sexual services. Therefore, the claim made in the post is false.
Claim:
A video shared on social media claims that transgender women assaulted an Indian Army general in Thailand.
https://x.com/navyhato/status/2094322001490116659
https://archive.ph/Scfgd
Fact Check:
To verify the claim, we conducted a Google search using relevant keywords but found no credible media reports confirming that Indian Army Lieutenant General Rajiv Kumar Sahni was involved in the incident. During the subsequent research, we compared the viral screenshot with the original report published by The Times of India. The comparison revealed that the original headline, “Indian national Raj Jasuja thrashed by transwomen in Thailand after allegedly refusing to pay for escort service,” had been digitally altered to read, “Indian Army Lieutenant General Rajiv Kumar Sahni thrashed by transwomen in Thailand after allegedly refusing to pay for escort service.” Further, both the viral screenshot and the original report display the same breadcrumb trail — “News / Indian National Raj Jasuja Thrashed By Transwomen In T…”. This provides further evidence that the headline in the viral screenshot was digitally manipulated.
After establishing the context of the viral claim, we conducted a Google search using relevant keywords. During the search, we found a report published on The Indian Express website on January 5, 2026, which featured the same visuals as those seen in the viral video. According to the report, a 52-year-old Indian tourist was allegedly assaulted by a group of transgender women in Pattaya, Thailand. The incident reportedly stemmed from a dispute over an unpaid fee for sexual services. The viral video, recorded on December 27, shows three transgender women allegedly assaulting the man with slippers. According to the report, the dispute escalated after the man allegedly refused to pay the amount demanded and attempted to leave the spot in a car. One of the transgender women reportedly accused him of refusing to make the payment. He was subsequently kicked and beaten before emergency responders intervened.
In the next step of our research, we found another report published on the India Today website on January 5, 2026. The report featured the same visuals as those seen in the viral video. According to the report, the incident took place on the morning of December 27, 2025, in the Walking Street area of Pattaya, Thailand.
Conclusion:
Our research found that the claim that Indian Army Lieutenant General Rajiv Kumar Sahni was assaulted in Thailand is false. The viral video actually shows an incident that took place in Pattaya, Thailand, in December 2025, in which 52-year-old Indian national Raj Jasuja was allegedly assaulted by a group of transgender women following a dispute over payment for sexual services. The viral post falsely links the incident to an Indian Army officer, thereby misrepresenting the identity of the person involved.
Over the last decade, battlefields have percolated from mountains, deserts, jungles, seas, and the skies into the invisible networks of code and cables. Cyberwarfare is no longer a distant possibility but today’s reality. The cyberattacks of Estonia in 2007, the crippling of Iran’s nuclear program by the Stuxnet virus, the SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline breaches in recent years have proved one thing: that nations can now paralyze economies and infrastructures without firing a bullet. Cyber operations now fall beyond the traditional threshold of war, allowing aggressors to exploit the grey zone where full-scale retaliation may be unlikely.
At the same time, this ambiguity has also given rise to the concept of cyber deterrence. It is a concept that has been borrowed from the nuclear strategies during the Cold War era and has been adapted to the digital age. At the core, cyber deterrence seeks to alter the adversary’s cost-benefit calculation that makes attacks either too costly or pointless to pursue. While power blocs like the US, Russia, and China continue to build up their cyber arsenals, smaller nations can hold unique advantages, most importantly in terms of their resilience, if not firepower.
Understanding the concept of Cyber Deterrence
Deterrence, in its classic sense, is about preventing action through the fear of consequences. It usually manifests in four mechanisms as follows:
- Punishment by threatening to impose costs on attackers, whether by counter-attacks, economic sanctions, or even conventional forces.
- Denial of attacks by making them futile through hardened defences, and ensuring the systems to resist, recover, and continue to function.
- Entanglement by leveraging interdependence in trade, finance, and technology to make attacks costly for both attackers and defenders.
- Norms can also help shape behaviour by stigmatizing reckless cyber actions by imposing reputational costs that can exceed any gains.
However, great powers have always emphasized the importance of punishment as a tool to showcase their power by employing offensive cyber arsenals to instill psychological pressure on their rivals. Yet in cyberspace, punishment has inherent flaws.
The Advantage of Asymmetry
For small states, smaller geographical size can be utilised as a benefit. Three advantages of this exist, such as:
- With fewer critical infrastructures to protect, resources can be concentrated. For example, Denmark, with a modest population of $40 million cyber budget, is considered to be among the most cyber-secure nations, despite receiving billions of US spending.
- Smaller bureaucracies enable faster response. The centralised cyber command of Singapore allows it to ensure a rapid coordination between the government and the private sector.
- Smaller countries with lesser populations can foster a higher public awareness and participation in cyber hygiene by amplifying national resilience.
In short, defending a small digital fortress can be easier than securing a sprawling empire of interconnected systems.
Lessons from Estonia and Singapore
The 2007 crisis of Estonia remains a case study of cyber resilience. Although its government, bank, and media were targeted in offline mode, Estonia emerged stronger by investing heavily in cyber defense mechanisms. Another effort in this case stood was with the hosting of NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence to build one of the world’s most resilient e-governance models.
Singapore is another case. Where, recognising its vulnerability as a global financial hub, it has adopted a defense-centric deterrence strategy by focusing on redundancy, cyber education, and international partnership rather than offensive capacity. These approaches can also showcase that deterrence is not always about scaring attackers with retaliation, it is about making the attacks meaningless.
Cyber deterrence and Asymmetric Warfare
Cyber conflict is understood through the lens of asymmetric warfare, where weaker actors exploit the unconventional and stronger foes. As guerrillas get outmanoeuvred by superpowers in Vietnam or Afghanistan, small states hold the capability to frustrate the cyber giants by turning their size into a shield. The essence of asymmetric cyber defence also lies in three principles, which can be mentioned as;
- Resilience over retaliation by ensuring a rapid recovery to neutralise the goals of the attackers.
- Undertaking smart investments focusing on limited budgets over critical assets, not sprawling infrastructures.
- Leveraging norms to shape the international opinions to stigmatize the aggressors and increase the reputational costs.
This also helps to transform the levels of cyber deterrence into a game of endurance rather than escalating it into a domain where small states can excel.
There remain challenges as well, as attribution problems persist, the smaller nations still depend on foreign technology, which the adversaries have sought to exploit. Issues over the shortage of talent have plagued the small states, as cyber professionals have migrated to get lucrative jobs abroad. Moreover, building deterrence capability through norms requires active multilateral cooperation, which may not be possible for all small nations to sustain.
Conclusion
Cyberwarfare represents a new frontier of asymmetric conflict where size does not guarantee safety or supremacy. Great powers have often dominated the offensive cyber arsenals, where small states have carved their own path towards security by focusing on defence, resilience, and international collaboration. The examples of Singapore and Estonia demonstrate the fact that the small size of a state can be its identity of a hidden strength in capabilities like cyberspace, allowing nimbleness, concentration of resources and societal cohesion. In the long run, cyber deterrence for small states will not rest on fearsome retaliation but on making attacks futile and recovery inevitable.
References
- https://bluegoatcyber.com/blog/asymmetric-warfare/
- https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2268&context=jss
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rising-tide-cyberwarfare-battle-between-superpowers-hussain/
- https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=gpis_etds
- https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=141708
- https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=gpis_etds
