Deepfake Video Of S Jaishankar Allegedly Admitting India Lost 3 Rafale Fighter Jets During Conflict With Pakistan Shared As Real

Several social media users are sharing a 1-minute 12-second video, claiming that external affairs minister S Jaishankar has admitted that India lost three Rafale fighter jets during its May 7, 2025 precision military strikes on Pakistani terror hubs under Operation Sindoor.

Here’s what Jaishankar purportedly says in the viral interview:

“…It’s been a national consensus that our dealings with Pakistan are bilateral. And in this particular case, I can tell you that I was in the room when [US] vice-president Vance spoke to Prime Minister Modi on the night of 9th May, saying that the Pakistanis would launch a very massive assault on India if we did not accept certain things. And the Prime Minister was impervious to what the Pakistanis were threatening to do. On the contrary, he indicated that there would be a response from us. This was the night before and something, you know, the Pakistanis did attack us massively that night.  We had already lost three Rafales to Pakistan two days ago, so it was very unfair of them to attack. But they did it anyway. We responded very quickly thereafter.  And the next morning, Mr. Rubio called me up and said the Pakistanis were ready to talk.”

The archived version of the post can be seen here, which has gone viral after a senior Indian military officer acknowledged last month that the Indian Air Force (IAF) lost “some aircraft” during its brief military conflict with Pakistan. However, the number or type of aircraft lost had not been specified.

Fact Check

Newschecker first ran a keyword search for “Jaishankar Rafale,” which did not lead us to any credible news reports about such a statement by the external affairs minister. We noticed that at the 00:57 mark, when Jaishankar purportedly said, “We had already lost three Rafales to Pakistan two days ago, so it was very unfair of them to attack. But they did it anyway,” sounded different, in terms of tone and unconvincing synchronisation of lip movements with speech, compared to the rest of the interview, raising our doubts on whether it was digitally altered.

We ran the suspicious seven-second audio excerpt past the Resemble Deepfake Detector, which found it “Fake”, while the remaining audio of the viral clip was termed as “Real”. Also, we ran the seven-second video excerpt past a community-driven open-source Deepfake detection tool, Deepware, which deemed it “suspicious.”

Newschecker ran the video past Deepfake-o-Meter, where its main classifier concluded a 100% probability of the video being “AI-generated”.

We then ran a reverse image search of keyframes, which led us to the original interview uploaded on Youtube by the US-based Newsweek on July 1, 2025. “Dr. S. Jaishankar, India’s External Minister (think Secretary of State of the United States) walks Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad through India’s relationships, dreams and dilemmas with everything (and everyone) from the U.S. & Trump to China & Pakistan,” read the description of the video.

The viral excerpt can be seen from the 42:13 mark, where we can clearly see that the alleged confession: “We had already lost three Rafales to Pakistan two days ago, so it was very unfair of them to attack. But they did it anyway”, was not part of the original interview. At the 43:10 mark, after Jaishankar says, “This was the night before and something, you know, the Pakistanis did attack us massively that night,” he continues to state, “We responded very quickly thereafter. And the next morning, Mr. Rubio called me up and said the Pakistanis were ready to talk,” further confirming that the viral video was AI-manipulated. The Newsweek and the Economic Times reports on the interview also prove that the viral video was altered and shared with a false claim.

Newschecker had already debunked another viral false claim that the Indian defence attaché to Indonesia, Captain Shiv Kumar, allegedly admitted that the IAF lost three Rafales, one Su-30MKI, and one MiG-29 during the May 7, 2025, strikes on Pakistani terror hubs. Newschecker found that the false claim was made by an earlier speaker, an Indonesian defence expert, at the seminar in Jakarta, which was denied at the earliest opportunity by Captain Shiv Kumar during the event.

Also Read: BTS Footage Of 2024 Film Falsely Shared As Video Of Iran Executing Israeli Spies

Conclusion

A viral video claiming to show S Jaishankar admitting that India lost three Rafale fighter jets during its May 7, 2025 precision military strikes on Pakistani terror hubs is a deepfake.

Source
Resemble Deepfake Detector
Deepfake-o-Meter
Youtube video, The Newsweek, July 1, 2025