A video of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh speaking to the press is being shared on social media, where users have claimed that he started "speaking out against his own Indian Army."
What does he say?: In the video, Singh purportedly claims that the intermittent conflict between India and China "is not that big an issue in our view."
He goes on to say that while the Indian government was providing "full cooperation to the military and is allocating more funds for this matter than before," the Indian Army's soldiers were "extremely troubled" by the conflict and were rebelling against the government.
The defence minister purportedly goes on to ask that while the Air Force and the Navy have had no issue with the conflict, then why was the Army "having such a hard time with this?," accusing the Army of aiming to defame the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) government.
At the time of writing this report, this post shared by X user 'anushitiwari22', which had previously been called out for sharing misinformation, had received nearly 1.24 lakh views.
(Archives of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, here, and here.)
Is it true?: No, the video was manipulated using AI and does not show an authentic statement by Singh.
How did we find out the truth?: Firstly, we started off by carrying out a keyword search with the term 'Rajnath Singh Indian Army China' to look for relevant reports, but did not find any credible ones which showed Singh making the statement in question.
Next, we ran a reverse image search on the video, using Google Lens, which led us to an X post featuring the defence minister, shared by news agency IANS, whose microphone can be seen in the video.
Shared on 26 October, the video showed Singh talking about Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge's alleged remarks on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's father, which he likened to "personal insults" and "crude language."
Singh said that Kharge's statement showed the Congress' ideological downfall, noting that while opposition of ideas, disagreement, and protests were welcome, the Congress should not stoop to personal attacks and insult.
There was no mention of China, the Indian Army, border conflict, or any of the armed forces as claimed.
The defence minister also shared the same statement on his verified X account.
Is it AI?: Since there was no evidence of Singh making the statement about China and the Indian Army, we ran it through two AI-generated content detectors.
Hiya's Deepfake Voice Detector checked the audio track and gave it a very low confidence score, indicating that it thought that the audio was likely to be AI-generated or a deepfake.
Hive Moderation's tool, too, indicated that the video was likely to have AI-generated or deepfake content, highlighting a 97.5 percent chance of it carrying AI-generated speech.
The Press Information Bureau's (PIB) fact-checking wing took to X to call out the claim, noting that the viral video was a "deepfake" and was digitally manipulated.
Conclusion: An AI-manipulated video is being shared to falsely claim that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh criticised the Indian Army over the conflict with China.
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)