Introduction:
A woman’s digital identity is more and more at risk of being manipulated in ways that existing legal principles were never meant to foresee. Using artificial intelligence, an ordinary photo can be turned into sexually explicit images, making a person appear to take part in acts that never happened. What makes this kind of abuse especially disturbing is that the victim does not have to have shared an intimate photo, done a private act or even had any contact with the perpetrator. A publicly available image of her may be all that is needed to build a completely fake sexual representation of her. The consequences, however, are anything but artificial. Once it is shared, such material can harm a woman’s personal relationships, professional reputation, psychological well-being and sense of safety. Even after the content is shown to be false, its circulation may keep exposing her to humiliation, suspicion and repeated victimisation. The way such material stays online permanently and can be copied again and again makes the chance of real recovery even harder. This raises a basic question about how Indian law understands sexual harm. Can legal protection properly deal with an injury when there has been no physical encounter or actual recording, yet a woman’s identity has still been used to create and spread sexual content? The problem is how to apply existing legal categories to a form of abuse that mixes identity manipulation, sexual exploitation and digital circulation. Although Indian law has provisions covering obscenity, voyeurism, impersonation and personal data, applying them together does not necessarily give full protection against the distinct harms of synthetic sexual imagery.
India’s current legislation
India does not have a deepfake-specific statute. Victims of such imminent harm have to rely on provisions designed for other mischiefs. Sections 67 and 67A of the Information Technology Act 2000 penalise the publication or transmission of certain obscene and sexually explicit material in electronic form, but they were drafted before AI-generated deepfakes became a significant concern. So now the court will decide whether a fabricated explicit video is “obscene” in a way a genuine recording is and whether the absence of any real act lessens the harm. For example, in situation A, someone secretly records a woman in an intimate situation and circulates the recording online. In Situation B, the photograph of the woman is taken without her consent and then AI is used to create a fake video showing her in an intimate situation. In Situation A, the recording depicts an actual event. In Situation B, the event may never have occurred. Hence, this difference can raise legal questions about how the existing provisions apply to fabricated content. In this entire scenario, the inquiry measures offence to public morality and not the injury to the women. It rather treats her violation as a question of decency, but in reality what was taken from her was her consent, dignity and bodily autonomy, all of which are guaranteed fundamental rights under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 doesn’t really do justice to this problem either. Section 77 deals with Voyeurism, which was built around capturing or transmitting real images of a private act, but the difficulty with deepfakes is that they may not involve capturing an actual private act. Therefore, the absence of an actual sexual act does not mean the absence of a genuine violation. Defamation under section 356 of BNS concerns the harm to a person’s reputation through statements or representations, and offers no complete answer either. By emphasising reputational harm, it risks evaluating the victim’s pain from the perspective of those who consume, judge and condemn her. This is the more insidious injustice; even when the woman’s body is fabricated, society behaves as if it owns her, determining her “worth” by the perception of others. Her dignity is contingent on their opinion, her violation minimised if not negated by the damage to her reputation. A woman’s right to bodily autonomy does not begin where public sympathy begins, nor does it disappear when public opinion remains unchanged. She does not have to be belittled, humiliated, or ruined for a wrong to have happened. The violation is in assuming her identity can be taken, sexualized, and disseminated without her consent. By the law measuring damage in terms of reputation, it protects her position in society and ignores her right to exist outside of society’s judgment.
India’s 2026 response to Deepfake abuse: progress and limitations
The government of India has taken certain steps that somewhat addresses the growing problem of deepfakes. In a statement presented to the Lok Sabha on 5th August 2026, it outlined the measures introduced to tackle non-consensual intimate imagery and AI-generated abuse. The amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, which came into force on 20 February 2026, specifically address harmful synthetic content, including non-consensual intimate imagery and impersonation. It is required that the platforms adopt reasonable technological measures to prevent the creation of unlawful synthetic material and shall not be eligible for any legal protection provided under section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 if they fail to adhere to the requirements laid upon them. The other major change made by the amendments is that the period to remove the unlawful contents after receiving an order from the court or a government intimation has been reduced from 36 hours to 3 hours. While for the complaints involving intimate images, nudity or electronic impersonation, including morphed images of a person, the platform must act within 2 hours instead of 24 hours that was earlier prescribed. The Government has further made available a Standard Operating Procedure, which came into existence on 11 November 2025, to help the victim, platforms, and the law enforcement authorities deal with the problem of non-consensual intimate images. Such measures have importance in that, where the sexual image of a woman becomes available online, every delay can increase the chances of its circulation. However, even quicker circulation does not necessarily amount to justice. This is because such measures are mostly relevant to the regulation of the platforms and harmful content and do not provide any guarantee for the woman’s compensation or punishment for her.
The Need for a Victim-Centred Legal Framework
India’s system is failing, and this failure shows up in two ways: there is no specific offence that covers this conduct, and there is also no legal process that gives attention to what the woman actually goes through when her identity has been violated. There may already be laws that deal with acts of impersonation, invasions of privacy, obscenity, and other kinds of criminal activity, but these laws do not necessarily cover the specific crime of creating a sexual identity for a woman without her consent. The law is able to categorise the material, control how it circulates, and even criminalise certain activities, yet it can do all of this without ever recognising the very core of the act, which is the act of assuming that a woman’s face can be used sexually and without her consent. This difference matters a great deal, because a woman should not be expected to show shame, disbelief, or disgrace before the law will recognise that she has been wronged. Secondly, simply removing the content will not make up for the damage that has already been done to the individual. What the victim really needs is a mechanism of redress that she can actually access, and that mechanism should include adequate compensation as well as steps to prevent the images from being spread any further. Third, the individual who seeks justice faces a number of challenges, such as the need to preserve evidence while at the same time carrying out an investigation without adequate forensic knowledge.
Conclusion
India has started to stir, and it has proven that the State is capable of acting within hours when it decides to do so. Yet so far, it has passed laws for the platform while treating the woman as a mere afterthought. A framework that truly took women’s lived experience to heart would accomplish four things. It would classify non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery as an offence rooted in consent, rather than in obscenity or modesty. It would grant victims enforceable rights to swift removal and to compensation. It would cultivate trauma-informed investigation and forensic capability in every State. And it would put an end to the illusion that a woman’s violation is a matter of public decency. Until that day, the law will go on asking whether the content is obscene, when the real question should be what was taken from her.
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Written by – Krittika Sengupta
References
Legislation
- Constitution of India 1950.
- Information Technology Act 2000.
- Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023.
- Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
- Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules 2026, GSR 120(E), Gazette of India, 10 February 2026.
Cases
- Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
Online Sources
- Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, official notifications and announcements concerning the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules 2026.
- Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, official materials concerning measures to address non-consensual intimate imagery and synthetically generated information.
