A 27-second video of Aaj Tak news anchor Sudhir Chaudhary allegedly presenting exit poll results as predicting an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) win in Delhi Lok Sabha elections is circulating on social media platforms. In the video, Chaudhary is heard saying, “Let’s talk about the West Delhi seat from where the Aam Aadmi Party’s candidate, Mahabal Mishra is leading against BJP candidate Kamaljeet Sehrawat.” On the left of the screen, text written in Hindi shows the opposition INDIA alliance with 59 percent and NDA with 41 percent votes. More graphics on the screen predict AAP winning three seats, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress getting two seats respectively.
Claim:
Rajasthan AAP State Vice President Kirti Pathak shared (archived here) the video on X (formerly Twitter), with a Hindi caption roughly translating to, “Now the national media of the country has also accepted that Mahabal Mishra is winning very strongly in West Delhi.”
Other archived versions of similar posts sharing the video can be viewed here, here, and here.
The national capital voted for all seven constituencies in the 2024 elections on May 25. Mishra is an AAP candidate contesting from the West Delhi constituency. However, Logically Facts found that the video is edited, and the audio is cloned using artificial intelligence.
Investigation:
A reverse image search of the video keyframe featuring Chaudhary led us to a video shared on Aaj Tak’s official (archived here) YouTube channel on May 16. The video is a live broadcast in which Chaudhary is seen in the same suit with a “Bahamas” advertisment running on the left — matching the viral clip.
The video primarily featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s live interview and details about AAP Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal’s assault case against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s personal secretary, Bibhav Kumar. The Delhi exit poll survey was not aired at any point during the eight-hour live broadcast.
The discrepancies
A closer look at the viral clip showed that Chaudhary’s lip movements were not in sync with the background audio. The anchor’s voice in the video is also monotonous, with no modulations in pitch and tone. Furthermore, Aaj Tak’s logo vanishes after five seconds at 0:05 in the viral video, which unlikely in television news broadcasting.
A report published by the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), an initiative by Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA), which Logically Facts is a part of, analyzed the video through deepfake video detection tools Hive AI and True Media and noted that the audio is generated using artificial intelligence with “a 100 percent confidence score.” The report also added that the voice delivery “sounds very robotic with no change in pitch or tone, uncharacteristic of the way he is known to speak.”
Subsequently, we also did not find any news report by Aaj Tak on the Delhi Lok Sabha election exit polls, which also hints that the numbers in the viral video’s bulletin are completely edited.
Moreover, Election Commission of India (archived here) guidelines stipulate a ban on releasing exit polls results till polling in the last phase closes which will be on June 1, 6:30 p.m.
Logically Facts has debunked such multiple AI-generated videos related to the 2024 Indian elections that can be read here, here, and here.
Conclusion: A manipulated video of anchor Sudhir Chaudhary allegedly presenting Delhi Lok Sabha election exit polls has been used to falsely claim that AAP’s West Delhi candidate Mahabal Mishra will win in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Therefore, we have marked the claim as fake.
(This fact check article was originally published by Logically Facts and has been republished by Lighthouse Journalism as a part of Shakti Collective)
