April 6, 2026
In April 2026 DAHRD published its most comprehensive election monitoring report — documenting what is, to our knowledge, the first industrialised AI disinformation operation in an Indian state election.
Ahead of Assam’s 9 April 2026 Assembly election, we monitored 273 social media accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and X with a combined follower reach of 407.4 million — approaching the entire population of the European Union. What we found was not a conventional campaign. It was a documented architecture of disinformation that manufactures an altered reality — one in which an entire community is simultaneously dehumanised, disenfranchised, displaced, and erased from cultural memory.
432 AI-generated posts across Facebook and Instagram reached 45.4 million views. A single account — politooons — accounted for 88% of all AI content views. At even 1% engagement, a single post in this network reaches 4 million people — more than one-sixth of Assam’s registered voters. Thirty-one confirmed deepfakes targeted the principal opposition candidate. Six AI-fabricated intimate videos targeted his wife — a private citizen. No precedent exists for this in Indian election monitoring.
Four exclusion operations ran simultaneously against Assam’s Muslim communities: dehumanisation through AI content and 18 verified CM statements; a voter roll purge removing 2.43 lakh names alongside a delimitation exercise that reduced Muslim-majority seats from 35 to 20; a 68-post eviction campaign celebrated as governance; and the systematic erasure of the Sufi saint Azan Fakir from Assamese cultural identity.
For the first time, AI propaganda translated directly into enacted legislation within one electoral cycle. The “Land Jihad” narrative became a property restriction law. The propaganda became law.
Every accountability institution failed. 119 MCC breaches produced zero ECI enforcement. Zero platform takedowns. The judiciary scheduled its hearing twelve days after polling. Most remarkably, CM Sarma admitted on record that his campaign vocabulary was deliberately rotated to evade legal liability — while the targeting never changed.
This model is not staying in Assam. West Bengal’s 2026 voter roll process has already suspended over 10 million voters using the same architecture. Assam is the laboratory. The rest of India is the intended market.
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