How Deepfakes Stole Women’s Faces and India’s Law Looked Away
Author: Mahak Chatkele, Rabindranath Tagore University
LinkedIn Profile : https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahak-chatkele-19994a278?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_android
Introduction
The blacks and the darks she wasn’t aware of it, she didn’t know it, until it was everywhere as a subject of harassment.
A morphed face. Her face. Placed on a body that wasn’t hers, in an act she never did, in a video she never made she couldn’t have thought about it ever, not even in her worst nightmares. Shared, saved, forwarded, posted, enjoyed by people who never knew her, who didn’t bother to know the reality of it, by people who never thought that next time it might be their mothers or daughters or sisters.
This is not fiction. This is deepfake artificial intelligence weaponised against real women, producing fabricated videos so convincing that truth becomes impossible to defend. In India alone, cases of deepfake-based harassment have surged in recent years, with women from all walks of life celebrities, students, professionals finding their faces stolen and their dignity destroyed by content they never consented to.
When actress Rashmika Mandanna’s deepfake went viral in November 2023, it did not just spark outrage it exposed a legal system that had no answer. No specific provision. No dedicated offence. No clear remedy for a woman whose face had been weaponised without her knowledge or consent.
India has laws. It has the Information Technology Act. It has the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023. What it does not have is a law that looks a deepfake victim in the eye and says what was done to you is a crime.
This article examines what deepfakes are, what the law offers, and why that offering is not enough.
Abstract
Deepfakes : artificially generated media that superimposes a person’s likeness onto fabricated content without their consent have emerged as one of the most violating forms of digital violence in the contemporary internet age. In India, their proliferation has outpaced every legislative response. No single statute specifically defines, criminalises, or provides remedy for deepfake-based harassment. Women bear the sharpest end of this crisis, with non-consensual intimate deepfakes constituting the overwhelming majority of reported cases globally and domestically.
When actress Rashmika Mandanna’s deepfake video went viral in November 2023, it forced a national conversation that Indian law was wholly unprepared to answer. The incident was not isolated it was symptomatic of a growing technological crisis meeting a shrinking legal response.
This article examines the deepfake phenomenon through an Indian legal lens analysing existing provisions under the Information Technology Act 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, identifying where each falls short, and arguing for dedicated legislative intervention. In a country where a woman’s face can be stolen, fabricated, and circulated without a single law naming it a crime, the gap between harm and remedy has never been wider.
To the Point
Beautifully, a woman is worshipped in public and harassed in private ; to hide the true face.
These dark faces did find the blacks of the internet with a new weapon using a woman’s face for their faceless actions. Deepfakes are not a distant technological threat debated in Silicon Valley boardrooms far apart. Instead, someone might be doing such acts now in front of our eyes but behind our back and ironically we might never know who it was, why it was, and how it was. The law isn’t as the law mimics the actual nightmares and one of such nightmares is deepfakes. Who is answerable to it? No one.
This is the reality Indian women navigate today. A face stolen in seconds. A video fabricated in minutes. A reputation destroyed in hours. And a legal system that takes years , if ever , to respond.
Deepfakes are AI-generated media that place a real person’s face onto fabricated content with a realism so convincing that truth becomes impossible to defend. The technology that generates them is no longer expensive, no longer rare, no longer difficult. Free applications, accessible to anyone with a smartphone, can produce a convincing deepfake in minutes. The barrier to creating one is significantly lower than the barrier to reporting one.
India’s legal framework was not built for this reality. The Information Technology Act 2000 was drafted when social media did not exist in its current form and artificial intelligence was not a household tool. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 replaced the Indian Penal Code but carried forward the same blind spots no definition of deepfakes, no specific offence, no victim-first procedure for AI-generated abuse.
What exists is a patchwork. Section 66E of the IT Act addresses privacy violation. Section 67 and 67A address obscene content. BNS Section 77 addresses voyeurism. None of these provisions were designed for content that is entirely fabricated ; where no actual act occurred, where no camera captured reality, where the only thing that is real is the woman whose face was taken without her permission.
The worshipping happens in public. The destruction happens in private. And the law — the one that was meant to stand between the two is nowhere to be found.
The crime exists. The law does not yet.
Legal Jargon
Deepfake — Artificially generated audio-visual content created using machine learning techniques, typically to superimpose a real person’s face or voice onto fabricated media without their knowledge or consent.
Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII) — The distribution of real or fabricated sexual images or videos of a person without their consent, commonly referred to as revenge porn or deepfake porn when AI-generated.
Intermediary Liability — The legal responsibility of digital platforms for content hosted or transmitted through their services, governed under the Information Technology Act 2000 and IT Rules 2021.
Right to Digital Dignity — An emerging legal concept recognising that every individual possesses the right to control how their likeness, identity, and image are used in digital spaces, flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution.
Morphing — The act of digitally altering a person’s photograph or video to misrepresent them, criminalised partially under existing IT Act provisions but not comprehensively addressed under current law.
Synthetic Media — AI-generated content including deepfakes, voice clones, and digitally altered images a category for which Indian law currently has no dedicated regulatory or criminal framework.
The Proof
Society loves to blame the victim instead of the perpetrator. The data shows so every time a crime morphed has been committed, the woman is the one who is first questioned and blamed, shamefully even about the photos.
The data does not lie even when the video does.
According to a 2023 report by Home Security Heroes, a cybersecurity research organisation, deepfake videos increased by 550% globally between 2019 and 2023. Of all deepfake content identified online, over 98% is non-consensual intimate imagery and over 99% of targets are women. These are not fringe statistics. They are a portrait of a crisis that is gendered by design.
In India, the National Crime Records Bureau does not yet maintain a dedicated category for deepfake-related offences which itself tells the story. A harm so widespread it has no official count. A crime so common it has not yet been named in the data.
The Rashmika Mandanna deepfake incident of November 2023 brought the issue into mainstream conversation. But Rashmika was not the first and will not be the last. Ordinary women students, teachers, professionals face the same violation daily, without the platform or resources that public figures have to respond.
What makes deepfakes uniquely devastating is their irreversibility. Once a fabricated video is shared, it cannot be unshared. It lives in downloads, private chats, and anonymous accounts that no takedown request can fully reach.
The proof is not just in the numbers. It is in every woman who found her face somewhere she never put it and had nowhere to go for justice.
Global Response — What the World Did When India Did Not
The absence of a dedicated deepfake law in India is not inevitable it is a choice. And the rest of the world has been making a different one.
United Kingdom — Online Safety Act 2023
The UK became one of the first countries to explicitly criminalise the sharing of non-consensual intimate deepfakes under the Online Safety Act 2023. The legislation places the burden not just on individual perpetrators but on platforms requiring them to proactively identify and remove such content before harm escalates. Intent to cause distress is not required for prosecution. The mere act of sharing a fabricated intimate image without consent is sufficient for criminal liability. This victim-first framing is precisely what Indian law currently lacks.
United States — State and Federal Action
The United States has no single federal deepfake law, but individual states have moved decisively. Virginia was the first to criminalise non-consensual deepfake imagery. Texas and California followed with dedicated legislation targeting deepfake pornography specifically. At the federal level, the DEFIANCE Act 2024 was introduced to create civil liability for perpetrators of non-consensual intimate deepfakes allowing victims to sue creators and distributors directly. The American approach recognises that victims need both criminal and civil remedies.
European Union — AI Act 2024
The EU’s landmark Artificial Intelligence Act 2024 — the world’s first comprehensive AI regulatory framework mandates that all deepfake content be clearly labelled as AI-generated. Failure to disclose the synthetic nature of media is treated as a fundamental rights violation carrying significant penalties. The EU framed deepfakes not merely as a criminal issue but as a question of human dignity and informational integrity.
South Korea and China
South Korea criminalised the creation, possession, and distribution of deepfake sexual content as early as 2020 among the earliest and strictest responses globally. China introduced mandatory consent requirements and platform labelling obligations for synthetic media in 2022.
Every one of these jurisdictions recognised deepfakes as a distinct harm requiring distinct legislation. India has issued advisories. The distance between an advisory and a law is exactly the distance between a woman and her justice.
Case Laws
Indian courts have not yet delivered landmark judgments specifically addressing deepfakes because the law has not yet given them the tools to do so. What exists instead is a trail of incidents, FIRs, and judicial observations that reveal a system straining against its own inadequacy.
Rashmika Mandanna Deepfake Case (2023)
When a morphed video of actress Rashmika Mandanna went viral in November 2023, the Delhi Police registered an FIR under Sections 465, 469 of the IPC and Section 66C of the IT Act provisions addressing forgery and identity theft, not deepfakes specifically. The case exposed how investigators are forced to apply century-old legal concepts to AI-generated crimes.
Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015)
The Supreme Court’s striking down of Section 66A of the IT Act removed one of the few broad provisions that could have been applied to deepfake harassment. The judgment, while a free speech victory, left a legislative gap that deepfake victims now fall directly into.
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017)
The nine-judge bench’s recognition of privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 provides the strongest constitutional foundation for deepfake victims. The right to control one’s own image and likeness flows directly from this judgment yet no legislation has translated this constitutional promise into a specific deepfake remedy.
Together these cases trace a legal landscape that knows the harm exists but lacks the vocabulary to address it completely.
Conclusion
She didn’t film it. She didn’t consent to it. She didn’t even know it existed until it was everywhere, wearing her face, carrying her name, destroying what took her years to build.
Deepfakes are not a future problem. They are a present one happening now, to real women, in real time, with real consequences that the law has not yet found the courage to name.
India has made legislative attempts. The IT Amendment Rules 2023 directed platforms to remove deepfake content within 24 hours of reporting. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 acknowledged the right to data integrity. But directives without definitions are hollow. Rules without remedies are performance. A woman whose face has been stolen and fabricated deserves more than a platform takedown request ; she deserves a law that calls what happened to her a crime, names the perpetrator, and builds justice around her experience rather than around the system’s convenience.
The worshipping happens in public. The destruction happens in private. And the law the one that was meant to stand between the two is still catching up.
Every woman who has ever been deepfaked deserved better. Every woman who will be deepfaked tomorrow deserves better. Your face is yours. Your likeness is yours. Your dignity is not content.
And until Indian law treats it that way , the crime will keep happening, and nobody will be answerable to it.
FAQ
Q1. Is creating or sharing a deepfake illegal in India?
Not explicitly. India has no law that specifically defines or criminalises deepfakes. Depending on the nature of the content, provisions under the IT Act Sections 66C, 66E, 67, and 67A and BNS Sections 77 and 79 may partially apply but none were designed for AI-generated fabricated content. The legal remedy available to victims remains fragmented and insufficient.
Q2. What should a woman do if she discovers a deepfake of herself online?
She should immediately report the content to the platform for removal and file a complaint at her nearest cyber crime police station or through cybercrime.gov.in. She should document all evidence — links, screenshots, timestamps before the content is taken down. Legal provisions under IT Act Section 66E and BNS Section 77 may apply depending on the content.
Q3. Why has India not passed a specific deepfake law yet?
Legislative response to technological harm in India has historically been reactive rather than anticipatory. Deepfakes entered mainstream awareness only recently and the regulatory conversation is still developing. The IT Ministry issued advisories to platforms in 2023 but stopped short of dedicated legislation. Until Parliament acts, victims will continue navigating a patchwork of provisions that were never built for the harm they are experiencing.
