Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju on Sunday accused the Congress of using an AI-generated photograph to create the impression of a massive turnout at the INDIA bloc's rally at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan, triggering a fresh political row over the size of the crowd at the opposition gathering.
In a sharp post on social media, Rijiju said the party had not even managed to prepare the artificial image properly, a jibe that was quickly amplified by other Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.
The INDIA bloc held its 'Chalo Dilli' protest rally at Ramlila Maidan on November 1 against alleged irregularities in electoral rolls and the Special Intensive Revision of voter lists, with top opposition leaders in attendance. Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were among those who addressed the gathering.
The rally was organised as part of the opposition's campaign against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged electoral irregularities.
Soon after the rally, an image showing a massive crowd at the venue began circulating on social media. It was shared by Congress MP Vamsi Gaddam and other party leaders, and was also posted by former MP and Congress Working Committee member Jagdish Thakor, along with a number of party supporters. Rijiju reacted by attaching the image to his own post on X and alleging that it had been generated using artificial intelligence rather than captured at the rally.
"To show a large crowd in Ramlila Maidan, the Congress Party should have at least prepared the AI-generated photo properly. Even the fake AI photo to show that the Ramlila ground was full is not done properly by the fake narrative team of the Congress Party!" Rijiju wrote, posting the message in Hindi followed by the English line.
The post, dated November 1, 2026, drew wide attention online and set off a debate about how crowd photographs from political rallies are shared and verified.
Several social media users had already flagged the image as AI-generated before Rijiju's post. According to reports, the image showed AI-generated depictions of Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi on the rally stage that looked different from the original stage at the venue, a detail that fuelled suspicion about its authenticity.
The episode has added to a wider conversation about the use of synthetic images in political communication, where photographs can be created, altered and spread within minutes, often faster than they can be checked.
The BJP's attack on the rally did not stop at the photograph. Party MP Sambit Patra alleged that the turnout was far below what the opposition had claimed, saying that a significant portion of Ramlila Maidan remained vacant during the event. According to news agency ANI, Patra claimed that around 5,000 to 7,000 chairs out of the 28,000 arranged at the venue were empty between 3.30 pm and 4 pm.
He said that about 40 per cent of the ground was vacant, even though the Congress had claimed that 10 lakh people would attend.
"The Congress said there will be a crowd of 10 lakh, but 40 per cent of the ground was empty," Patra said, describing the crowd shown in the circulated image as "trick photography" and adding that "tricks don't make one Prime Minister", in a swipe at Rahul Gandhi. BJP leaders posted images and videos of empty chairs at the rally and termed the event a "flop show", arguing that the crowd was nowhere close to the opposition's claims.
The BJP also criticised the opposition for holding the protest on the anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, a point raised by party leaders as part of their broader attack on the rally. The combination of the AI image allegation and the empty-chair claim gave the ruling party a two-pronged line of attack: that the opposition had exaggerated its support, and that it had relied on artificial imagery to do so.
The row comes at a time when the INDIA bloc's campaign against the Election Commission has intensified. At the rally itself, Rahul Gandhi launched a sharp attack on Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, calling the 2024 Lok Sabha elections "illegal" and alleging large-scale irregularities in the electoral rolls.
The opposition has made the Special Intensive Revision exercise a central plank of its campaign, arguing that the revision process threatens to disenfranchise voters. The BJP has rejected those charges, and the exchange at Ramlila Maidan has now spilled into a dispute about images and attendance figures.
For the Congress, the AI image controversy is an unwelcome distraction from the rally's message. The party had projected the gathering as a show of opposition unity, bringing together leaders from across the alliance on a single stage in the national capital. The attendance claim of 10 lakh people was meant to underline the scale of public anger over the electoral rolls issue.
The BJP's counter-claim, built around the chair count and the vacant sections of the ground, seeks to undercut that projection and portray the rally as a much smaller affair than advertised.
Political analysts note that disputes over crowd size are a recurring feature of large rallies, but the AI dimension gives this episode a newer edge. In earlier years, arguments about attendance relied on competing photographs and eyewitness accounts. Now, with AI tools able to generate realistic crowd scenes, the question is not only how many people attended but whether the images purporting to show them are real at all.
The Rijiju episode illustrates how quickly such a question can become a political weapon, with a single post turning a disputed photograph into a talking point across news channels and social media.
What remains undisputed is that the rally took place, that senior opposition leaders attended, and that both sides have offered sharply different accounts of its scale. The Congress has pointed to the turnout at Ramlila Maidan as evidence of public support for its campaign on electoral rolls. The BJP has pointed to empty chairs and the AI image allegation as evidence that the support was overstated.
As with many such disputes, the competing claims are likely to persist, with each side using its own images and numbers to make its case.
The episode also highlights the growing challenge for voters trying to judge political events from what they see online. A photograph that appears to show a packed ground can now be produced without a single person standing in it, and the tools to detect such images are still catching up with the tools that create them.
In that environment, a minister's social media post can travel as far as any official statement, and a single image can shape the public memory of a rally as much as the speeches delivered on its stage.
For now, the BJP has succeeded in shifting part of the conversation away from the opposition's charges against the Election Commission and towards the credibility of the opposition's own publicity. Whether that shift lasts will depend on how the Congress responds and whether the electoral rolls campaign regains the focus its organisers intended.
What is certain is that the Ramlila Maidan rally will be remembered not only for what was said from the stage, but for the argument about a photograph that followed it.
(Reporting based on News18, The Economic Times, NDTV and The Week.)