Imagine scrolling through your social feed and seeing a video of a senior Indian Army officer apparently admitting that China has seized Indian territory and cut off supplies to soldiers. Your first reaction is shock, then anger, then a compulsive urge to share it so others know what is happening. Now imagine discovering that the officer never said any such thing, the footage was from a routine press briefing in Kashmir a year earlier, and the words were digitally altered to push a false narrative. This has become the reality of the border crisis along the Line of Actual Control, or LAC, in Arunachal Pradesh. Against the backdrop of renewed military friction between Indian and Chinese troops, a wave of old videos, doctored clips, and fabricated quotes is being spread across social media, creating the impression that India is suffering humiliating setbacks on its own soil. The Indian Army has been forced to set up a dedicated fact-checking account on X to debunk these claims one by one. The situation is especially delicate because the LAC is not a mutually demarcated boundary; India and China have different perceptions of where the line actually runs, which makes confrontations over patrolling points almost inevitable. On October 22, Director General Shatrujeet Kapoor of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police said Indian and Chinese troops had faced off at multiple locations along the LAC since at least July, with reports of Chinese forces denying Indian patrols access to key areas near Taksing. In such a tense and confusing environment, misinformation becomes a weapon, and the posts flooding social media are designed to provoke exactly the kind of emotional reaction that overwhelms careful verification.
One of the most striking examples of this disinformation campaign involves a deeply fake video featuring Lieutenant General Girish Kalia. In the manipulated clip, Kalia is made to appear as if he is revealing that China has taken control of Asaphila, Longju, and Taksing in Arunachal Pradesh and has blocked essential supplies to Indian troops. The Indian Army’s fact-checking account, which has been working overtime, exposed the video on October 25. The original footage was actually from a press briefing given by Kalia, then a Major General, in Kupwara, Jammu and Kashmir, on October 27, 2023. At that briefing, he talked about foiled infiltration attempts across the Line of Control, the elimination of 27 terrorists, and the recovery of weapons and narcotics. There was no mention of Arunachal Pradesh, China, or any territorial loss. The fact-checkers even pointed out that the video carried the hashtag “SyntheticGeneratedInformation,” a telltale sign that it was not a genuine leak but a synthetic fabrication. Another video that went viral claimed to show Chinese soldiers frisking Indian troops inside Arunachal Pradesh, an image that would enrage any Indian. The truth, however, was far less dramatic. India Today’s fact-check unit traced the clip to Devanahalli, near Bengaluru in Karnataka, where Indian security forces had conducted a mock drill. A local shopkeeper whose shop appeared in the footage confirmed that he had filmed it in May, long before any LAC standoff. What the video actually showed was Indian soldiers practicing counter-terrorism procedures, not Chinese troops humiliating Indian personnel. Yet the clip was shared with a caption claiming that Indian soldiers needed Chinese permission to move through their own country. These two examples illustrate a broader pattern: old military footage, stripped of its original context, is repackaged with false location tags and fabricated narratives to manufacture outrage and spread distrust.
The flood of misinformation did not stop there. Another false claim insisted that an Indian Army soldier had been shot in the head by an unknown gunman in Ladakh. The Indian Army’s fact-check account dismissed this on October 24, explaining that no such incident had occurred and that the circulated image appeared to show Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel, not evidence of a deadly attack. Around the same time, a series of Pakistan-linked social media accounts took footage of protests in Arunachal Pradesh against the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project and twisted it into an “anti-Indian Army uprising.” The demonstrations were real, but the framing was completely false: people were protesting a dam project, not rebelling against the armed forces. The campaign expanded beyond fringe accounts. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, MeitY, stepped in on October 26 after detecting a coordinated effort to spread a video of Chinese commercial vehicles near Nathu La Pass in Sikkim. The posts claimed these vehicles had entered Indian territory without authorization and that mainstream media was covering up the intrusion. MeitY clarified that the vehicles were at a designated border trade point, where commercial movement is permitted under bilateral agreements between India and China. Then it went further: it identified twelve specific social media handles that had posted the same content within a narrow window of about four and a half hours, a classic sign of coordinated inauthentic behavior. The handles listed included Indian-looking names, which makes the operation even more insidious. The strategy is not subtle: take a mundane event, strip away the official context, add a scary caption, and let the algorithms do the rest. The result is a false narrative of Chinese military aggression and Indian media complicity, designed to inflame nationalist anger and undermine public trust in institutions.
The misinformation machine continued churning out new variations. On October 26, the Indian Army fact-check account flagged a digitally manipulated video that falsely attributed alarming remarks to Lieutenant General Manoj Kumar Katiyar, the retired former commander of the Army’s Western Command. In the doctored version, Katiyar appears to warn that Arunachal Pradesh could become India’s next major military flashpoint. The original footage, however, came from a media interaction at Chandimandir in Panchkula on March 30, 2026, the eve of his retirement. In that interaction, Katiyar discussed Operation Sindoor, Operation Rahat, and the operational preparedness of the Western Command. He made no statement about Arunachal Pradesh whatsoever. The same day, fact-checkers exposed yet another misleading clip: a TikTok video of an exercise by Kazakhstan’s special operations forces was being circulated with the claim that it showed Indian and Chinese troops clashing in the Taksing region. Keen-eyed observers and fact-checkers noted that the soldiers’ web equipment clearly bore the markings “AOK-CCO,” identifying them as Kazakh forces, not Indian or Chinese troops. Looking at the broader timeline, a clear pattern emerges from the fact-checking efforts over just a few days. On October 24, footage of ITBP personnel in Ladakh was twisted into a claim that a soldier had been shot dead. The same day, genuine protests against the Siang dam were misrepresented as an anti-Army uprising. On October 25, Lieutenant General Kalia’s old Kashmir briefing was doctored to claim Chinese territorial gains, and a Bengaluru counter-terror drill was passed off as Chinese soldiers searching Indian troops. On October 26, authorized Chinese trucks at Nathu La were portrayed as an invasion, a Kazakhstan military exercise was presented as a China-India clash, and Lieutenant General Katiyar’s retirement interaction was manipulated into a warning about Arunachal Pradesh. In every case, the formula was identical: real footage plus false context plus fabricated quotes equals a misleading military narrative. This is not random internet chaos; it is structured, repetitive, and increasingly sophisticated.
The question that naturally arises is whether this is a coordinated psychological operation, a psyop, by China or Pakistan. The Indian Army’s fact-check account has directly linked several of the posts to Pakistan-based propagandist accounts, while MeitY’s identification of a synchronized cluster of handles points to deliberate coordination. China’s involvement cannot be confirmed in every instance, but it would hardly be unprecedented. Consider what happened after Operation Sindoor, India’s military response to the Pahalgam terror attack. A US congressional commission, the United States Economic and Security Review Commission, alleged that Beijing orchestrated a disinformation campaign to discredit the French-made Rafale fighter jet. According to the commission, Chinese-linked accounts circulated AI-generated images and video game visuals, falsely presenting them as wreckage of Indian Rafales destroyed by Chinese-supplied weapons in Pakistani hands. The obvious goal was to undermine the Rafale’s reputation among potential buyers, since the fighter is operated by more than ten countries and India had ordered additional jets. New Delhi admitted to losing some aircraft during the operation but repeatedly denied that any Rafale was shot down by Pakistan. That did not stop the claims from spreading. Among those who amplified the Rafale conspiracy theories was Pierre-Henri Chuet, a former French Navy fighter pilot, who is now under formal investigation in France over alleged intelligence activity benefiting China and disclosure of national defense secrets. Chuet has denied any wrongdoing and has not been convicted, but the case shows how easily false narratives can travel across borders and gain traction even among credible-looking voices. The Rafale episode is a reminder that disinformation is not just about spreading lies; it is about shaping global perceptions, damaging rival nations’ credibility, and influencing future purchasing decisions.
China’s cognitive warfare capabilities have developed dramatically over the years. The FBI has openly warned that the Chinese government uses tactics aimed at influencing lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies favorable to Beijing. A 2022 study in the Journal of Global Security Studies examined how China uses online disinformation alongside military intimidation to shape public opinion, particularly in Taiwan. The study found that Beijing’s influence operations are not limited to obvious falsehoods. Content farms can publish seemingly useful everyday information while embedding pro-China narratives, slowly shifting readers’ perceptions over time. Social media accounts amplify misleading claims, exploit existing political divisions, and create confusion. A 2025 analysis by the United States Studies Centre in Australia described China’s broader cognitive warfare strategy as an effort to weaken an adversary’s resolve and shape its strategic decision-making without resorting to armed conflict. The scale is enormous: in the first nine months of 2026 alone, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau reported that China spread more than 2.5 million pieces of disputed or false online information targeting the island. This is not a niche concern; it is a central element of modern statecraft. A NATO-cited study by retired Lieutenant General DS Hooda and retired Lieutenant Colonel Pavithran Rajan emphasized that the information reaching the public at home can shape perceptions of a conflict just as much as actual battlefield developments. In other words, a war can be won or lost in the minds of citizens before a single additional soldier crosses a ridge. So are China and Pakistan currently running a psychological operation against India amid the LAC standoffs in Arunachal Pradesh? It is difficult to say with absolute certainty. But the sudden surge of manipulated videos, the coordinated posting patterns, the use of Pakistan-linked handles, and the deliberate targeting of emotionally charged border issues all point to a concerted effort that demands caution. The best defense is not just institutional fact-checking but a more skeptical public. Before sharing that alarming video, pause and ask: Is this real? When was it filmed? Who is saying it? What is the original context? The answer to those questions can turn a weapon of confusion into simply another piece of noise. In the fog of the LAC, truth is the first casualty, but it can be rescued if enough people refuse to spread the fake.