Manoj Tiwari
Singer, Actor and Member of Parliament
Bhojpuri singer and actor turned BJP Member of Parliament who became the subject of the first documented use of AI deepfakes in an Indian election — campaign videos that put his own face and voice into languages he does not speak.
In his words
Deepfake technology has helped us scale campaign efforts like never before. The Haryanvi videos let us convincingly approach the target audience even if the candidate didn’t speak the language of the voter.
Biography
Manoj Tiwari (born 1971) is a hugely popular Bhojpuri singer and film actor who parlayed his celebrity into politics, becoming a BJP Member of Parliament from North East Delhi and, for a period, president of the Delhi state BJP.
The first deepfakes in an Indian election
Ahead of the February 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, the BJP worked with a communications firm to create AI-generated versions of a Tiwari campaign video, synthesising his lip movements so he appeared to deliver the same message in Haryanvi and in English — languages he does not campaign in. Widely reported by Vice and others as the first known use of deepfake technology in an Indian political campaign, the videos were distributed across roughly 5,800 WhatsApp groups, reaching an estimated 15 million people.
[Kejriwal] cheated us on the basis of promises. But now Delhi has a chance to change it all. Press the lotus button on February 8 to form the Modi-led government.
Tiwari and the BJP treated the AI likeness as a straightforward outreach tool rather than a deception to be disowned, extending his reach to Haryanvi-speaking migrant voters. That embrace — using generative AI to multiply a politician’s own voice — is what places him, uneasily, on the pro side of this archive, even as the episode became a cautionary tale about synthetic media in democracy.
Where they stand in the war
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/manoj-tiwari