Claim: Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar has commented on India’s documentary on Operation Sindoor, saying that the generals “acted very well” but “the army’s performance was not that good”.
Fact: The video is an AI-manipulated version of an authentic press conference from December 2025, when Kumar spoke about Indian Street Premier League (ISPL).
Between 18 and 20 August 2026, multiple social media accounts posted a video of Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar mocking a documentary on Operation Sindoor, which was carried out during the four-day May 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan.
In the video, Kumar says, “The documentary on Operation Sindoor is performing great. All the generals have also acted very well. See, in the Sindoor war, the army’s performance was not that good. The international media that was saying that the Indian jets have downed should now see how the world is watching the victory of our army in the documentary.”
Screenshot of the viral claim.
The viral posts are accompanied by captions such as the following:
- “بالی ووڈ اداکار اکشے کمار سے منسوب بیان: **’آپریشن سندور کی ڈاکیومنٹری نے بھارتی فوج کی میدانِ جنگ کی کارکردگی سے زیادہ بہتر کام کیا۔‘** یہ بیان سوشل میڈیا پر زیرِ بحث ہے اور اس کے حوالے سے مختلف دعوے گردش کر رہے ہیں۔ [Statement attributed to Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar: **’The Operation Sindoor documentary did a better job than the battlefield performance of the Indian Army.’** This statement is being discussed on social media and various claims are circulating regarding it.]”
- “اکشے کمار نے آپریشن سندور کی بینڈ بجادی 🇵🇰💪 [🇵🇰💪 Akshay Kumar slams Operation Sindoor]”
- “صندور آپریشن میں ہماری فوج کی کارکردگی کچھ خاص اچھی نہیں رہی۔ دنیا کہہ رہی تھی کہ ہمارے جہاز گرے ہیں، لیکن اب آپریشن سندور کی ڈاکیومنٹری میں دنیا ہماری فتح دیکھ رہی ہے۔ اکشے کمار تو سیدھا بھارتی فوج کی حقیقت بتا رہا ہے کہ یہ میدانِ جنگ میں خراب کارکردگی دکھاتے ہیں، بس فلموں میں ہیرو ہیں۔ بقول اکشے، ’’ہمارے جنرلز کی ایکٹنگ بھی بہت اچھی رہی‘. یعنی جنگ لڑنا ان کے بس کی بات نہیں، ایکٹنگ ہی ان کا میدان ہے۔ [Our army’s performance in Operation Sindoor was not very good. The world was saying that our planes had fallen, but now the world is seeing our victory in the documentary of Operation Sindoor. Akshay Kumar is directly telling the truth about the Indian army that they perform poorly on the battlefield, they are only heroes in films. According to Akshay, ‘Our generals’ acting was also very good.’ That is, fighting a war is not their only business, acting is their field.]”
India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025
In May 2025, India and Pakistan engaged in the most intensive four-day conflict in decades, exchanging drones, fire, shelling, and missiles that brought the two nuclear-armed nations to the brink of an all-out war.
The conflict was triggered by the killing of at least 26 people by assailants at a resort in Pahalgam in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025. New Delhi blamed Pakistan for the attack, a claim Islamabad has consistently denied.
During the four-day conflict, India also sent Israeli-made Harop drones to Pakistan, which were reportedly shot down by the army. Soch Fact Check visited and investigated two crash sites each in primarily residential parts of Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore; read our on-ground report here.
On 10 May, US President Trump announced a ceasefire, which was then confirmed by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and later by India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri.
Trump’s announcement came after US State Secretary Marco Rubio spoke separately to Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Foreign Minister Dar, and Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
On the other hand, Pakistan expressed gratitude to the US, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif thanking Trump “for his leadership and proactive role” as well as Vice President JD Vance and Rubio “for their valuable contributions for peace in South Asia”.
India’s documentary on Operation Sindoor
On 15 August, India released a two-part documentary on its May 2025 conflict with Pakistan on the Discovery Channel India.
Titled “Declassified: Operation Sindoor,” it details India’s actions “through interviews with senior Indian national security and military officials, operational commanders, and others involved in the fighting”, according to Arab News.
However, Pakistan immediately rejected it as “inaccurate” and warned that “any future Indian military action will draw ‘firm, decisive and disproportionate response’”, the publication said.
The Pakistan Army’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), also issued a press release, noting that India “has not declassified the truth” but, instead, “cobbled together a propaganda video to project a military blunder as a successful endeavour”.
The ISPR further termed the documentary “as a tragedy and a comedy at the same time”, saying it contained “selectively edited interviews, emotional narration, and cinematic Bollywood style reconstruction” in order to “alter established facts and rewrite the operational outcome”.
“No amount of cinematic reconstruction can change the chronology, erase aircraft losses, conceal military casualties, alter the military engagements that actually took place or convert a battlefield defeat into a self-proclaimed victory,” the military said.
On 22 August, the state-run Pakistan TV published a “fact-check” on “Declassified: Operation Sindoor”, stating that “a closer examination of the film’s own timeline, official statements, and claims leaves several important questions unanswered”.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reverse-searched keyframes from the viral video and found that it is from a 2025 press conference predating the release of the Operation Sindoor documentary in August 2026.
Held on 9 December 2025 in Mumbai, the press conference was about the Indian Street Premier League’s (ISPL) third season. Kumar spoke of his association with it from the start and its success, according to Lokmat Times.
The press conference was also aired by multiple channels on YouTube, including the digital edition of India’s Economic Times.
The footage was also published by Asian News International (ANI) on X (formerly Twitter).
Deepfake detection tools
Suspecting manipulation using artificial intelligence (AI) tools, we tested the video in multiple deepfake detectors.
Soch Fact Check tested two samples in Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector: “All the generals have also acted very well. See, in the Sindoor war…” and “The international media that was saying that the Indian jets have downed should now see how…” The tool labelled both as “likely a deepfake” and provided scores of 4 and 18 out of 100.
Results from Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector.
According to Hive Detect’s results, there is a 65.6% chance that the video contains AI-generated speech. It also detected a 81.5% chance of AI-generated speech at the 0:00 mark.
Results from Hive Detect.
The NVIDIA Synthetic Video Detector said the video is “likely synthetic or AI-generated”, with a score of 51.2%, which is “greater than threshold (30%)”.
Results from NVIDIA Synthetic Video Detector.
Interestingly, one social media clip appears to be an uncropped version of the viral one; we identified the logo of Wan AI, an AI video generation model owned by China’s technology giant, Alibaba Group.
Screenshot identifying the logo of Wan AI.
Sound engineer’s analysis
For further verification, Soch Fact Check also sought a comment from Shaur Azher, a lecturer who teaches sound design and sound recording at the University of Karachi and the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST). He also works as an audio engineer at our sister organisation, Soch Videos, and specialises in mixing and mastering audio.
Azher explained that for comparison purposes, Sample A is the claim and Sample B is the actual video of Kumar’s comments. He said Sample A “was entirely synthesised by software, whereas Sample B is the authentic, real-world recording”.
“The unnatural pacing, the complete lack of natural breathing and human mouth sounds, the altered acoustic fingerprint, and the artificial background static all prove that Sample A is a deepfake,” he added.
To support his conclusion, Azher provided the following observations:
- The voice fingerprint: Just like an actual fingerprint, a person’s voice has a unique acoustic shape. When a computer checks the core sound waves of both audio clips, the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) do not match up at all.
- Breathing and speed: Sample A rushes through the words unnaturally with low pacing variation. Sample B maintains a natural human rhythm with high cadence energy, where the speaker pauses organically, shows emotion, and takes normal breaths.
- Missing mouth sounds: Real people make tiny noises when they speak, like lips parting or slight tongue clicks. Sample A is suspiciously smooth and is completely missing these normal human imperfections, showing zero transient mouth clicks.
- Fake background static: Sample B captures the natural room tone fingerprint and dynamic echo of a physical space. Sample A covers up the fact that it wasn’t recorded in a real room by laying down a blanket of artificial, constant static over the voice.
- Unnatural pitch: Sample A artificially boosts the higher frequency bands of the voice in a way that a physical microphone simply doesn’t do, giving it a slightly synthetic or tinny ring, whereas Sample B sounds natural.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the viral video is AI-manipulated.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the video circulating multiple times on Facebook, at least four times on Instagram, and once on X.
Conclusion: The video is an AI-manipulated version of an authentic press conference from December 2025, when Kumar spoke about ISPL.
Background image in cover photo: akshaykumarofficial
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