Followers of the Hindu nationalist ‘Hindutva’ movement are using AI-generated pornographic images to degrade Indian Muslim women – including public figures. Their tactics, argues Sonia Sarkar, serve the movement’s wider drive to humiliate India’s 200-million-strong Muslim community
Since Narendra Modi became India's Prime Minister in 2014, Hindutva activists have unleashed hostility and violence against religious minorities. Their principal target has been Muslims, India's biggest religious minority. Modi claims that gender inclusion is a core element of his policymaking. Yet the flag-bearers of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regularly exploit AI-generated semi-pornographic and pornographic images to degrade Muslim women.
Over the past decade, Muslim women in India have faced hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim harassment, and misogynistic attacks. Muslim women suffer cyberstalking, bullying, harassment, trolling, doxxing, and even threats of rape and murder. More recently, AI-generated sexualised content has played an increasing role.
Between May 2023 and May 2025, the US-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) studied 297 public accounts across X, Instagram, and Facebook that produced AI-generated content aimed at degrading Muslims. The study found that sexualised depictions of Muslim women attracted the highest engagement (6.7 million interactions). This reveals the gendered character of much Islamophobic propaganda, which fuses misogyny with anti-Muslim hate.
Scroller.com is a website that publishes images and videos sourced primarily from Reddit. One of its AI-generated memes depicted a burqa-clad woman kissing a Hindu man in jeans. The image was a reference to the repeal of Article 370 in 2019, which took away Kashmir’s limited autonomy and placed the conflict-ridden Muslim-majority region under direct control of India’s central government. The meme suggested, through a sexualised nationalist metaphor, that Hindu men’s sexual subjugation of Kashmiri Muslim women symbolically represents Hindu political control over Kashmir.
A recent study of AI-generated content aimed at degrading Muslims revealed that sexualised depictions of Muslim women attracted the highest engagement
Another meme shows a Hindutva leader with a widowed Muslim woman. The picture carries the caption: 'after defeating the Musalmans [Muslims], Hindutva leader Pratap Rathod paid a visit to your freshly widowed ammi [mother] and compelled her to become a sanskari wife at your Muslim father’s funeral'. 'Sanskari wife' is a reference to the expectation for a Muslim woman to adopt Hindu customs.
Hindutva trolls create images of Muslim women in burqas surrounded by men, with captions suggesting incestuous relationships. They cast Muslims as marked by morally corrupt social and family practices.
In 2021 and 2022, two malicious online platforms – Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai – posted altered photos of Muslim women activists and journalists who have publicly criticised the Hindu nationalist movement. The images appeared to show Hindu men auctioning off the women. Police arrested the platforms' creators but the two were swiftly released on bail, and have yet to face justice.
Anti-women hate culture and digital sexual violence are also bound up with political aggression via the consumption of porn. Indeed, porn makes up the bulk of messages shared on Indian political WhatsApp groups. Earlier in 2018, a fake porn video of journalist Rana Ayyub circulated on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and X. Hindutva activists posted it in revenge for Ayyub’s reporting on the rape of an 8-year-old Kashmiri girl by a Hindu temple caretaker and several police officers.
Hindutva ideology has always been based upon a gendered Muslim 'other', using women’s bodies as battlegrounds. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, Hindus killed more than 1,000 people, largely Muslims, while Narendra Modi was chief minister of the state. In 2008, 11 Hindu men gang-raped a pregnant Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano. In 2022, Modi's government released them from prison.
As Hindu nationalist sentiment rises, scholars note that nationalism's imaginative constructs are built 'around women’s bodily metaphors and sexual norms’.
The aim of Hindutva nationalist propaganda is to cast Muslims as sexually or socially immoral, delegitimising their political views
Sexualised imagery ties Muslim women’s bodies to their ethnic identity. Hindu men assert dominance by degrading Muslim women through violent sexual fantasies. Memes depict Muslim women without their consent, as trophies in a narrative of domination. Hindutva propaganda and online abuse are key tactics for undermining women’s bodily autonomy. Their aim is to cast Muslims as sexually or socially immoral, delegitimising their political views.
Nationalist discourse has long portrayed women as carriers of culture. Female sexuality is a key site of struggle in national and ethnic conflicts. Controlling it thus confers power over rival groups, and community honour is linked to women’s bodies.
According to Joane Nagel, masculine interests and ideologies shape nationalist movements, reinforced through the interaction between masculine microcultures and nationalist thought. Sexualised militarism portrays enemy men as hypersexual and emasculated, and ‘enemy’ women as promiscuous.
Most contemporary sexual violence involves intimidation of women. Yet its overarching aim is to humiliate a particular community or ethnic group to dominate it and – in extreme cases – achieve ethnic cleansing.
Sexual desire in Hindu-majority India shapes sexual fantasies, blending religious and ethnic identities with urges to force others into submission
Feminist historian Urvashi Butalia writes that in conflict situations, particularly those involving religious identities, ‘women carry the honour of the community on their backs and bodies’. ‘Defiling their bodies’ is thus a way of ‘hitting back at the other community’.
Online sexual abuse and porn consumption intersect with the power-pleasure matrix, and political mobilisation. Soma Basu calls this 'the confluence of eroticism with political discourse'. Sexual desire in Hindu-majority India is ethnicised against the Muslim 'other', shaping sexual fantasies, blending religious and ethnic identities with urges to force the 'other' into submission. In online pornography, on political discussion boards, and social media channels, religious and sexual identities intertwine.
The Indian government labels online critics of Hindu nationalism 'traitors', and is quick to arrest them. But it lacks genuine political will to tackle anti-Muslim content online because it serves the government’s broader Hindutva agenda to demonise Muslims.
