Claim
CDS General Anil Chauhan said India surrendered Arunachal to China due to weak IAF.
Fact
Viral video is doctored by using AI-generated voiceover.
A viral video allegedly showing Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan saying that India “surrendered Arunachal to China due to weak Indian Air Force (IAF)” is going viral on TikTok.
TikTok user @nationgazette posted a video showing CDS Gen Anil Chauhan addressing naval officers. In his address, Gen Chauhan says, “I want to assure our naval officers that we should never lose hope. Although I am aware that the Indian government has surrendered Arunachal and Ladakh to China due to a weak air force. But be assured that the Indian Navy is not weak and Pakistan will never be able to damage any port city of India. Even on May 10, Pakistani naval ships could not reach Gujarat, their drone state, which is a failure on the part of air defence not us.”
Text superimposed on the video reads, “India surrendered Arunanchal and Ladakh to China due to weak IAF.” The video caption reads, “At the INA passing-out parade in Ezhimala, CDS Gen Anil Chauhan said he knows Arunachal & Ladakh were surrendered to China due to a weak IAF, but insisted the Indian Navy is strong and Pakistan can’t harm any Indian port city.”
The video posted on November 29 has accrued 3001 likes, 373 users have shared it and 123 people have commented until the last count.
An archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
Newschecker found the claim to be deepfake.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the veracity of the claim, we ran a search on Google by clues from the video captions and found a news article, dated Nov 29, 2025, published on ANI online, and a post with a video on its official X (formerly twitter) page. The image carried in the article and the video posted on X of ANI bore close resemblance to the viral clip.
We found that the article reported on the CDS General Chauhan’s address to the newly inducted naval officers passing out from India Naval Academy, Exhimala, Kerala. However, we did not find any reference of him saying that India surrendered Arunachal to China due to the weak Indian Air Force (IAF).
Newschecker did not find any credible news reports about such a statement by General Anil Chauhan.
Deepfake Detection Tools Confirm AI-Generated Audio
Newschecker’s investigation found multiple layers of evidence confirming that the viral video is fake. The Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector gave the voice an authenticity score of just 3 out of 100, indicating a very high likelihood of AI manipulation.
Similarly, The DeepFake-O-Meter, developed by the University at Buffalo’s UB Media Forensics Lab, concluded that the audio was AI-generated, with three of its analytic outputs rating extremely high.
PIB Fact Check Also Declared The Video Fake
On 29 November 2025, Press Information Bureau (PIB) fact check, the notified fact checking unit of India’s central government, formally clarified that CDS Chauhan never made the alleged statement and confirmed that the circulating video regarding CDS General Chauhan is digitally altered video.
Conclusion
The viral video claiming that CDS General Anil Chauhan said India “surrendered” Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh to China has been doctored using an AI-generated voiceover.
