There are some unsurprising lessons to be learned from India’s elections

This year’s ongoing elections in the world’s most populous country, India, where incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third term, are an enormously complex process. The six-week event started on April 19, and finishes on June 1 over the course of seven phases in different parts of the country, with some 970 million people out of a total population of 1.4 billion electing the 543 members of the Lok Sabha, the so-called House of the People, the lower house of its bicameral system. The results will be announced on June 4.

A process of such dimensions and in a country of such strategic importance can be seen as a huge laboratory to understand other electoral processes. In spite of the enormous differences between India and other democracies, many of the potential problems derived from the exploitation of social vulnerabilities are exacerbated, verifying effects that, in other elections, might pass largely unnoticed.

The first noteworthy aspect of the Indian elections is that any technology that can be leveraged for political ends will be. There has been a plethora of deepfake videos created using generative artificial intelligence. We saw the first use of deepfakes in an Indian election during the polls for the Delhi legislative elections in February 2020, in this case reasonably…