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BJP’s national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi revealed a set of audio recordings alleging opposition leaders, MPs, and police officers were collaborating to run illicit financial activities to fund the opposition’s election campaign on the eve of the Maharashtra state elections on November 19. The catch? The clips were found to be AI-generated by multiple news outlets and fact-checking organisations.
The audio clips in question contain conversations allegedly between Maharashtra Congress Cheif Nana Patole, NCP (SP) MP Supriya Sule, IPS Officer Amitabh Gupta, and an employee of an audit firm Sarathi Associates named Gaurav Mehta. The party has also posted the clips to its official Twitter account, claiming they tell the story of illicit financial practices and the use of cryptocurrency by the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), a state-level political alliance of centre-to-centre-right political parties in the state of Maharashtra.
Outside of news outlets, including NDTV, The Quint, Hindustan Times, and The Wire claiming that the clips were AI-generated or manipulated, Supriya Sule also denied the claims. Instead, she filed a complaint with the police and the Election Commission against ex-IPS officer Ravindranath Patil, who had also made the same allegations, and Gaurav Mehta.
She has also declared her intention to sue Sudhanshu Trivedi for defamation. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has already raided Mehta’s premises as part of the ongoing investigation alleging a scam involving a ₹6,606 crore Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme run by Singapore-based Variable Tech Pte Ltd. In response, Maharashtra’s deputy CM, Ajit Pawar has since doubled down on BJP’s claims, stating that he recognised the voices of Patole and Sule in the clips.
The Wire ran the clips through TrueMedia.org’s deepfake detection tool and found that three of the four clips showed substantial evidence of being AI-generated. One of the voice notes showed little evidence of being AI-generated, likely due to its short, five-second duration. Additionally, they also compared the voices of Sule, Patole, and Gupta from the voice notes with publicly available interviews on YouTube. They reported that none of the voices in BJP’s audio clips match the original voices of the speakers.
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