AI images revive false Sonia Gandhi ‘bar dancer’ smear

AI-generated images circulated by BJP state handles have portrayed Sonia Gandhi as a bar dancer, reviving a false claim that has circulated online for years. The material drew criticism from opposition figures and others, while an essay argued that generative AI has made an old form of gendered political attack far easier to produce and spread. The images targeted Gandhi, 79, a former Congress president and sitting Rajya Sabha MP. Frontline described several posts by BJP state handles depicting her as a “bar dancer”, and said fact-checkers had repeatedly debunked claims that she had been a bar dancer or waitress. Maktoobmedia reported that BJP’s Gujarat unit posted an AI-generated image showing Gandhi in revealing clothes, holding alcohol and standing beside foreigners in what appeared to be a bar. The post was later removed. BJP units in Kerala and Telangana also shared AI-generated images targeting her. The Telangana BJP image showed a woman dancing in a bar and was captioned “Lusiana, Italy. Circa-1970s”, an apparent reference to Lusiana, where Gandhi was born and raised. A BJP-linked Uttar Pradesh IT cell account posted a six-second video, labelled “80’s Trend”, that showed Gandhi dancing in a rural setting while balancing a tray with three beer glasses. The posts emerged amid a viral AI-driven trend that used tools including ChatGPT to turn contemporary photographs into retro-style portraits. Maktoobmedia said the immediate exchange began after Congress’s Kerala unit posted an AI-generated image captioned “A Gujarat street in the 80s”, featuring a man in the front passenger seat of a Maruti Suzuki Omni. Congress leaders and other critics condemned the BJP material. TMC MP Sagarika Ghose accused the BJP and RSS of detesting women, calling misogyny in the Sangh Parivar “ideological, institutional and utterly shameless”. Congress leader Pawan Khera called the content a commentary on the BJP’s “primitivity, cruelty and intellectual rot”, and alleged that it had resorted to character assassination because it had “no argument left”. Indian Youth Congress called the posts “filth” and said they exposed the “real face” behind the BJP’s women-focused messaging. Journalist Rana Ayyub said they reflected an “obsession with sexualising its political opponents”. Critics also contrasted the posts with BJP slogans including “Nari Shakti” and “Beti Bachao”. The AI images followed a much older falsehood built around archival photographs. For more than a decade, social-media users have miscaptioned pictures of Gandhi as images of Marilyn Monroe, Ursula Andress and other unrelated women. One repeatedly recycled black-and-white image shows three women dancing. A fact-check by Offbeat Concerns traced it through its Getty Images watermark to a photograph by Vic Sumner, titled “Go-Go dancing girls help break the beer drought at Rawson Hotel in Auburn on 21 November 1967.” It was taken at the Rawson Hotel in Auburn, Sydney, during celebrations after a strike by more than 2,000 brewery workers ended following 14 days of negotiations. The fact-check found no facial resemblance between Gandhi and the woman falsely identified as her, and said there was no evidence that Gandhi had ever been a bar dancer. A similar earlier claim used a bikini photograph of Ursula Andress, falsely captioned as an image of a dancer from Italy. The essay’s argument is that the misogynistic visual trope itself is not new, because political culture already contains established codes for reading women shown in bars, at parties or in particular clothes. What generative AI changes is the means of production: a user can translate “thin-sliced thoughts into images”, alter a subject’s apparent age or clothes, or use an old photograph for facial similarity. The technology can also generate video, allowing an invented body to dance. Propagandists no longer need to find an image that fits a story because the story can produce its own archive. That enables “endlessly reproducible political images” at unusual speed and scale, while making it harder for women politicians to retain control over an appearance they may have spent years negotiating in a gendered political environment. The essay cautioned against treating the issue solely as a question of whether a picture is real. Detection and labelling answer the question, “Did this event happen?” but do not address why a particular body is made to dance, or how that image makes the person politically vulnerable. India’s IT Rules define “synthetically generated information” as artificially or algorithmically created, modified or altered audio, visual or audio-visual material that appears real and portrays an individual or event in a way likely to be perceived as indistinguishable from a natural person or real-world event. The rules, updated Feb. 10, also state that references to information in the context of an unlawful act include such synthetic material unless the context requires otherwise.