Claim: During a speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India would use Afghanistan to fight Pakistan.
Fact: A review of the original footage and AI-based deepfake detection models confirms that the clip was manipulated.
A video of Indian prime minister has been shared online containing the following text: “بھارتی صحافی گیتا بسو اس نے نریندر مودی کی تقریر کا سینسر شدہ حصہ جاری کر دیا جسے کسی بھی بھارتی میڈیا پر نشر کرنے کی اجازت نہیں تھی۔
مودی نے خود اس میں بھارت کی خفیہ حکمت عملی کا انکشاف کیا دہلی میں ہنگامہ ، میڈیا میں خاموشی”
[Translation: Indian journalist Geeta Basu has released the censored part of Narendra Modi’s speech, which was not allowed to be broadcast on any Indian media outlet.
In it, Modi himself revealed India’s secret strategy. There is chaos in Delhi, but silence in the media.]
Following is our translation of what Modi says in Hindi: “I want to say that now no soldier of Hindustan will be martyred at the border because we have made the Afghan Taliban our servants for our army. These people lick my shoes for a few dollars. You just saw how Afghanistan’s minister, Muttaqi, was begging Jaishankar to arrange a meeting with Modi ji. But Jaishankar ji said that it will take Afghanistan at least one and a half centuries to become equal to Modi ji, maybe then you people will be able to meet him.”
He further added, “So we have adopted this method that Pakistan will be confronted through terrorism. To weaken Pakistan, we will make the Afghans fight against them because in the map of Akhand Bharat, Afghanistan is also included. Our political strategy is that both Muslim countries fight each other. The Afghans will take a little money from us and destroy each other.”
Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan
Overnight border clashes on 12 October between Pakistan and Afghanistan left dozens of fighters dead, both countries confirmed to Reuters, which called it “the most serious fighting between the neighbouring countries since the Taliban came to power in Kabul.
According to officials, Afghan troops opened fire on Pakistani army posts along the north-western border on Saturday, 11 October, and seized several of the posts, The Guardian reported. The attacks came after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan accused Pakistan of carrying out airstrikes on the country’s sovereign territory, particularly in the capital of Kabul, earlier that week. On 12 October, Pakistan responded with retaliatory airstrikes, gunfire, and ground raids targeting Afghan Taliban posts along the border.
The media wing of the Pakistan military released a statement reporting that 23 soldiers were killed and 29 others wounded in the attacks. The statement further claimed that 200 “Taliban and affiliated terrorists” were killed in the retaliatory strikes and that several terrorist training camps had been dismantled.
On 11 November, a suicide attack outside a court in Islamabad killed at least 12 people and injured 27. Following the attack, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, issued a statement alleging that the attack was carried out by Afghan-based militants “at the behest of India” and described the attack as a “nefarious conspiracy”, according to The Guardian.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reverse-searched keyframes from the viral video to trace its source and understand the context of Modi’s speech. We found footage streamed live on 20 October 2025 by the Indian news outlet The Tribune, titled “LIVE: PM Modi’s speech during Diwali celebration with armed forces on board the INS Vikrant.” A review of the complete broadcast confirms that the Indian prime minister did not mention Afghanistan or the Afghan Taliban at any point.
The viral clip shows several visual and audio inconsistencies. For instance, Modi’s lip movements do not match the audio and the text that appears on his shirt in the viral clip. The visual below shows the viral clip on the left with what looks like gibberish text on the Indian premiers shirt, whereas, in The Tribune’s video, the text is clearly Hindi. Additionally, a circular-marked structure visible in the original footage appears elongated in the viral version. The livestream also shows a glass of water that is missing in the viral clip.
Loud background music has been overlaid onto the viral video, which is absent in the original, and the prime minister’s voice echoes unnaturally. While Modi’s attire and the overall setting match the original footage, the inconsistencies strongly indicate that the viral clip was manipulated.
Therefore, Soch Fact Check analysed the video using DeepFake-O-Meter, which runs it through multiple AI-based detection models.
We first used TALL (2023). This model tests whether a model can still understand a video’s content and motion even when some details are missing, and the video is compressed into a thumbnail-like format. It does this by taking a video, hiding small parts of each frame in the same spot to see if the model can still make sense of it. Then, it shrinks each frame into a smaller image and rearranges them into a single thumbnail layout. This layout becomes the test input. The model rated the probability of the video being fake at 87.2%, indicating that the video is most likely manipulated.
Next, the video was analysed through the WAV2LIP-STA (2022) detection model, which is designed to catch lip-sync based deepfakes, where the mouth movements don’t quite match the speech. It rated the clip 98.1% indicating a high likelihood of manipulation.
Lastly, the video was analysed using the XCLIP (2022) model, which rated the probability of the video being fake at 80.3%. This model uses cross-frame attention to analyse how frames relate to each other over time. This makes it good at spotting inconsistencies in facial movements, expressions, and temporal flow, which are common signs of deepfakes.
Soch Fact Check also conducted a keyword search to verify whether a correspondent named Geeta Biswas exists in India and did not find any record of any active journalist by that name. Instead, we only came across Geeta Vishwas, a fictional journalist from the an Indian superhero series Shaktimaan. Two Indian fact-checkers independently confirmed this as well.
Virality
The claim was shared here on Facebook.
On X, it was shared here (archive).
Conclusion: The viral video claiming that Prime Minister Modi said India would use Afghanistan to fight Pakistan is manipulated.
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