Drunk Bhagwant Mann video is fake

TLDR

• Aaj Tak and Newschecker say a viral clip of Punjab's chief minister apparently drunk does not show him.¹²
• The footage matches a 2017 clip of a different man; Newschecker found a copy dated 26 May 2017.¹²
• Outlets differ on method: Aaj Tak says face swap, Newschecker says likely AI-generated.¹²

A roughly 30-second video of a man in a chair, hooting and shouting, has been shared on X as footage of Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann drunk.² Two Indian fact-checkers traced the footage to a 2017 video of someone else.¹²

Why it matters: Punjab goes to the polls in 2027, and the clip was shared to mock Mann's government.² The checks show how a keyword search on a spoken line and a reverse search for older copies can undo a face-altered clip.

Driving the news:

• Aaj Tak searched for the line the man shouts, "apne munde da viah", and found a September 2017 YouTube upload showing a different man in the same seat saying the same words.¹
• Newschecker found a Facebook post dated 26 May 2017 with the same gestures, utterances and background positions, and several other 2017 posts of the same footage.²
• Newschecker also saw distorted hands on a person behind the man and unusually blurred background figures.²
• Newschecker ran the clip and extracted keyframes through several detection tools. It reports Hive Moderation at 72.7% likely AI-generated or deepfake, and further tools flagging synthetic content.²

The big picture: Aaj Tak and Bharat Express describe an edit in which another man's face was replaced with Mann's.¹³ Newschecker's wording is more cautious: the clip "may have been created" by using the 2017 video as a reference and generating a lookalike with AI tools.² All three agree the man on screen is not Mann.¹²³

The other side: Newschecker reports the detection scores without saying how reliable the tools are for this type of clip. The dates also differ: Newschecker's earliest copy is May 2017, Aaj Tak's is September 2017, so neither establishes the original upload.¹²

Single-source note: Bharat Express repeats the details in Aaj Tak's check (same 2017 source and same account of the original man) and does not appear to add independent work.¹³ The original man, identified by name in two of the sources, is not named here. The first poster of the 2026 clip and the creator of the altered version are not identified by any source.