‘Looked so real’: How AI is being weaponised against India’s Muslim women

Front-line counsellors at the helpline, including Salman Mujawar, whose work with survivors forms the basis of much of the organisation’s published evidence, said they have documented a rise in the number of such cases.

Since its inception in 2022, Meri Trustline has handled more than 482 cases, roughly 10 percent of which involved digitally manipulated material – a share that has been growing as AI tools become more accessible.

“These violations are muted by shame, fear and trauma,” Mujawar said. “Incidents are rarely revealed even to close family members, let alone featured in larger public discourse.”

‘Pornification of politics’

Ayoub’s video circulated across multiple social media accounts within hours. Abusive comments, threatening phone calls and accusations about her character followed quickly.

“It felt like a digital lynching,” she said. “Not one but more than a dozen accounts were posting that video everywhere, and hundreds of others were resharing it.”

The data set compiled by the CSOH includes AI-generated memes portraying Muslim women in religious attire in sexually suggestive scenarios as well as fabricated pornographic imagery targeting journalists and activists. Across many of these images, researchers observed a recurring visual pattern: a “Muslim-coded woman” paired with a “Hindu-coded man”.

“In these narratives, Muslim men are often depicted as violent or morally corrupt,” Khan said. “Meanwhile, Muslim women are portrayed as submissive or ‘rescued’ by men from the majority community.”

This imagery, researchers argued, is not incidental to political discourse – it is a part of it.

Sahana Udupa, a media anthropologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, described the phenomenon as part of a broader “pornification of politics” targeting women and minority communities. Right-wing digital cultures, she said, combine humour, memes and sexualised imagery to normalise abuse.

“These practices form an ecosystem,” Udupa said. “They thrive on group celebration and collective aggression.”

That ecosystem, scholars noted, has deeper ideological roots than mere misogyny. Writing in the peer-reviewed South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, researcher Soma Basu argued that what is unfolding is the politicisation of the sexual itself.

Muslim women’s bodies have become battlegrounds for communal dominance – a dynamic that found its most visible expression in the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai” controversy, mock-auction platforms that targeted Muslim women in India and which Basu links to both formal support from officials of the governing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and informal backing from the party’s digital volunteers.

Khan’s research arrives at a similar terrain from a different angle. “In many South Asian cultures, women are portrayed as the honour of the family,” she said. “So attacking Muslim women visually becomes a way of portraying Muslims as inferior.”

Khan herself found the research deeply affecting. “As a Muslim woman and a researcher, it had a profound impact on me,” she said.

“I remember being quite horrified when I saw images of a woman wearing a headscarf being represented as soft porn. As a woman, you already deal with misogynistic behaviour daily. This is another layer added to your identity.”

Responding to these concerns, Atif Rasheed, a BJP politician, said AI “can be used both positively and negatively” and called for stronger regulations to prevent its misuse. He called deepfake and sexually explicit content “very disappointing” and said there should be strict action against the perpetrators.

However, he rejected viewing the issue through a religious lens, saying the BJP “respects women of all religions” and the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai” cases were handled in accordance with the law.

Familiar pattern amplified by AI

The Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai episodes, which occurred in 2021 and 2022, used doctored images. Both triggered widespread outrage and police investigations.

Indian authorities arrested Aumkareshwar Thakur, accused of creating the “Sulli Deals” handle, and Niraj Bishnoi, identified as the creator of “Bulli Bai”, in January 2022. Both Thakur and Bishnoi were granted bail by a New Delhi court on “humanitarian grounds” two months later.

Police officials escort a man and a woman after they appeared before a court following their arrest over alleged involvement in an online app that shared pictures of Muslim women for a virtual ‘auction’ in Mumbai, India, on January 7, 2022 [Niharika Kulkarni/Reuters]

Researchers believe the rise of generative AI has dramatically expanded the scale and speed of harassment of Muslim women online. New applications allow users to upload photographs and automatically generate sexualised images. Such tools are widely available online, often for free, and require no technical expertise.

“There is a very long history of technology being used to target and harass women, especially minority women,” said Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the CSOH. “What is different now is the extent of violation and the scale of harm that AI tools enable.”

For those already living with sustained harassment, the emergence of AI-generated imagery has added a new dimension of fear.

Afreen Fatima, 27, a researcher and activist who has faced online abuse since speaking out against India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2019, was among the dozens of Muslim women whose photos were uploaded and “auctioned” on Sulli Deals.

The law, declared by the United Nations as “fundamentally discriminatory” against Muslims, seeks to fast-track Indian citizenship for non-Muslim minorities who arrive in India from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries before 2025.

Afreen Fatima protesting against India’s citizenship law [Courtesy: Afreen Fatima]

Four years after the Sulli Deals controversy, the abuse has hardly subsided. Anonymous accounts, often using common Hindu names, continue to seek her out with abusive messages, rape threats and targeted harassment, some tied to her work, despite her limited social media presence.

“Every few days, there is a message from some random account with rape threats or death threats,” she said.

The prospect of AI-generated sexual imagery has intensified that fear. “When I read about these images, it felt very personal. They create a fear psychosis.”

Fatima said hate online has also shaped how she navigates public spaces.

“I feel uncomfortable travelling alone,” she said. “When you see these kinds of fantasies circulating online about Muslim women, you start wondering whether someone might attack you in real life.”

‘I don’t feel safe’

After the video went viral, Ayoub’s professional opportunities began to disappear.

“As a model, your reputation matters,” she said. “If negative comments appear on your profile, brands stop approaching you.”

For four or five months, fake accounts flooded her profile with abusive comments, deterring potential clients. The harassment also changed her relationship with social media.

“Instagram used to be a safe space for me,” she said. “Now I don’t feel safe there, and I limit what and how I post.”

Ayoub reported the incident to the police cybercrime unit in New Delhi, filing written complaints. “Nothing happened,” she said, adding that most of the abusive content was removed only because her friends reported those accounts en masse.

Legal experts said India’s existing laws struggle to keep pace with AI-generated content. “The harm is real even when the image itself is fabricated,” said Apar Gupta, lawyer and founding director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.

Under Section 66E of India’s Information Technology Act, criminal penalties apply to capturing or publishing images of a person’s private areas without consent. But if a target’s body was never actually recorded – in other words, if the image is entirely AI-generated – the provision may not apply.

“Even if the image is fake, it creates a permanent scarlet letter for women,” Gupta said.

Digital platforms, meanwhile, enjoy “safe harbour” protection as long as they remove illegal material once notified. But Gupta said many victims struggle to even get that far.

“Platforms don’t make it easy for you to report that this is my image, this is a deepfake, you need to remove it,” he said.

Without structural changes to platform design, algorithmic priorities and legal frameworks, AI-generated abuse will continue spreading faster than any legal system can respond to it, he warned.

In such a scenario, accountability remains elusive for targeted Muslim women.

“What I wanted most was to find the people behind those accounts,” Ayoub said. “They destroyed my reputation without even knowing me.”