A hateful line at a BJP political rally may disappear from the news cycle within a day. But when the same rhetoric is transformed into an AI-generated image, video, or meme, it can be reproduced, reshared, and circulated across platforms long after the original speech has faded from public attention. That difference explains why the rise of AI matters for the politics of religious hate in India. It allows political rhetoric to move beyond the rally and into a digital ecosystem where it can be repeated, amplified, and made to appear increasingly familiar. This is why we should stop treating AI-generated anti-Muslim content as a collection of isolated posts and start examining the broader system through which political narratives are transformed into scalable digital propaganda.

Let’s start with the numbers, because they tell the story on their own. In 2025, independent researchers at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate recorded 1,318 hate-speech events in India. That’s 13 percent more than in 2024, and almost double the number from 2023. Out of those 1,318 events, 1,289 that’s 98 percent targeted Muslims. Now add another finding from the same group: just 297 social media accounts posted 1,326 AI-generated anti-Muslim images between mid-2023 and mid-2025. Those posts were viewed and shared over 27 million times. Sexual images of Muslim women alone got 6.7 million interactions. These are not small numbers from a hidden corner of the internet. This is now part of everyday online life for millions of people.

This is the part that’s uncomfortable to say clearly, but it needs to be said. Human Rights Watch looked at 173 speeches given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 2024 election campaign. In at least 110 of them, they found Islamophobic language Muslims called “infiltrators,” described as a community that “has too many children.” Other top BJP leaders, including Home Minister Amit Shah and the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Assam, used similar language. This matters because it shows where the words came from. The phrases that later turned into memes, videos, and AI images were not invented by random people online. They were first spoken on stage, by the most powerful politicians in the country. So the internet didn’t create this hatred out of nothing. It simply took hatred that already existed and made it spread much faster and much further.

And that’s really the key connection here, the thing that links every part of this problem together. It comes down to one simple idea: repetition. If you hear a claim once, you question it. But if you hear the same claim fifty times, on five different apps, in ten different formats, something changes. It stops feeling like a claim you should check. It starts feeling like something everyone already knows to be true. AI didn’t invent anti-Muslim prejudice in India. What it did was remove many of the barriers to spreading it. In the past, spreading a hateful idea took effort, you needed a speechwriter, a printing press, or airtime on television. Now, anyone with a laptop can turn that same idea into a shareable image in minutes, often with little way to trace who made it. As one researcher put it, AI tools make old prejudices “scalable, faster, cheaper, and harder to trace.” That’s exactly how normalization works: repeat something enough times, through enough channels, and it stops looking like an opinion and starts looking like a fact.
Underneath all of this is another problem: the platforms themselves. Reports documenting millions of views on AI-generated hate content have also raised concerns about how rarely such material is removed, even after being reported. If platforms respond quickly to powerful actors but slowly to real harm, that raises serious questions about whose safety actually matters.
None of this means every act of violence can be traced back to one specific post, it can’t, and the evidence doesn’t claim that either. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the bigger pattern. Human Rights Watch’s 2025 report documented Muslim homes being illegally demolished after communal violence and raised concerns about authorities targeting victims rather than those responsible. USCIRF has repeatedly recommended that India be designated a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom. India’s government rejects these assessments as biased, but rejecting a finding is not the same as disproving it.

So here’s the honest, harder truth this isn’t a story about a handful of bad people online. It’s a story about political language that got picked up and massively amplified by a digital system built to reward attention, not truth and a moderation system that treats the damage as somebody else’s job to fix. Fixing content moderation alone won’t stop the speeches. Stopping the speeches alone won’t fix the platforms. Every part of this chain is connected to the next. And right now, every link in that chain is still holding strong.

The author is a student at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, and is currently serving as a researcher at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Islamabad.