From Nitin Gadkari to Salman Khan: Why Courts Are Pulling Platforms Into Personality Rights Cases

India's courts are increasingly being asked to police a problem the law hasn't quite caught up with. What happens when a person's face, voice or identity is manipulated online without consent?

Earlier this month, the Bombay High Court ordered platforms including Meta, Google and X Corp to take down AI-generated deepfakes of actor Preity Zinta.

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has also moved court against the same platforms over morphed content tied to his ethanol policy, and the Delhi High Court has intervened in Salman Khan's case against a film teaser he says draws on his identity without permission.

Taken together, these cases point to a shift, personality rights disputes are no longer just about anonymous infringers, but about whether the platforms hosting the content should be held to account too.

What are Personality Rights?

Personality rights are legal protections that let individuals control the commercial use and public representation of their identity, including their name, image, likeness and voice. They rest on two components: the right to privacy, which guards personal dignity, and the right of publicity, which stops others from commercially profiting off a person's fame without consent.

These rights cover name and likeness, voice and signature (including cloned AI voices), and broader personal traits used for public endorsement, giving individuals power to authorise or block merchandise, ads and fake endorsements, while stopping short of blocking legitimate news reporting, satire, parody or artistic expression.

Indian courts have grounded personality rights in two roots: the right to privacy and personal liberty under Article 21, established in cases such as K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) and R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994); and the civil law doctrine of "passing off," which traditionally required proof of actual commercial confusion, according to LiveLaw.

Why Don't India's Laws Clearly Define Personality Rights?

India has no single statute dedicated to personality rights. Protection is pieced together through Article 21 balanced against Article 19(1)(a)'s free speech guarantee.

Alongside statutes that were never designed for this purpose, including the Copyright Act, 1957 (performers' moral rights under Sections 38A, 38B and 57), the Trade Marks Act, 1999 (Section 14, restricting false-endorsement use of personal names) and the IT Act, 2000 (Section 66C, on identity theft).

Courts have filled this gap case by case, extending protection to figures including Akshay Kumar, Shilpa Shetty, Suniel Shetty, Kartik Aaryan, Arijit Singh, Amitabh Bachchan and the late Asha Bhosle, ahead of the Preity Zinta ruling.

Why are Platforms Now Being Impleaded?

In India, personality rights litigation has moved beyond simply chasing down anonymous infringers, courts are now increasingly pulling social media platforms directly into these cases, ordering companies like Meta, X, Google and YouTube to take down offending content, and in some instances, to hand over subscriber details and IP logs tied to alleged violators.

In the Preity Zinta matter, the Bombay High Court's Justice Madhav J. Jamdar directed Meta, Google LLC, X Corp and several websites to remove identified AI-generated content after her legal team flagged around 275 online links carrying deepfake videos and chatbot-style interactions built around her identity.

Separately, Gadkari moved the Bombay High Court against Meta, X Corp and Google LLC over allegedly defamatory posts and deepfakes targeting his ethanol fuel policy, seeking a permanent injunction.

In the Salman Khan matter, the Delhi High Court directed removal of X and YouTube links carrying the teaser for Kala Hiran: The Battle for Legacy, on his plea that it unlawfully drew on his personality rights.

Notably, the Delhi High Court's order in Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors. (2023) and the Bombay High Court's ruling in Arijit Singh v. Codible Ventures LLP & Ors. (2024) stopped platforms from using AI to copy artists' voices without consent, LiveLaw reported.

How are Courts Balancing Free Speech and Reputation?

Courts have held that personality rights protections don't extend to blocking legitimate news reporting, satire, parody or artistic expression, balancing free speech under Article 19(1)(a) against Article 21's protections for dignity and reputation.

Hearing the Salman Khan matter, Justice Jyoti Singh of the Delhi High Court warned, "this must stop," remarking "reputation once lost is lost," and telling the producer's counsel, "you seem to think you are above the law," as reported by LiveLaw.

The producer's side had argued the material was "only a teaser" that neither named Khan nor used deepfake or AI-generated content, a defence the court did not accept.

Could this Reshape Intermediary Liability?

In the Preity Zinta hearing, while Meta told the court it was willing to remove the identified links, it also suggested future complaints involving genuine images might need verification first.

Justice Jamdar reminded intermediaries that India's IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require due diligence, warning platforms risk becoming part of the problem if they don't act swiftly, and observed that global tech companies should be more proactive, since inaction could amount to contributing to rights violations.

However, Section 79 of the IT Act, 2000, the "safe harbour" rule, treats platforms as neutral pipelines, which are not responsible for user-uploaded content, but generative AI disrupts that assumption, because these systems don't merely host user data, they actively recreate human identity, noted the LiveLaw report.

The IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules of 2026 introduced fast-tracked takedown timelines for "Synthetically Generated Information," but LiveLaw notes it still relies on a reactive model, responding only after infringing content is uploaded.

What Does this Mean for AI-Generated Content and Deepfakes?

India still has no dedicated law regulating deepfakes either, victims rely on the same patchwork of constitutional, copyright and IT Act provisions used for personality rights generally, with the Bombay High Court increasingly filling that gap through case law.

The Preity Zinta ruling covered deepfake videos, morphed photographs and AI-generated chatbot personas, with the court finding that unauthorised use of a person's image and likeness can infringe their personality, publicity and moral rights, while affecting their dignity under Article 21.

LiveLaw's analysis frames this as "Identity Diffusion," when AI tools let anyone generate endless clones of a person capable of holding unique conversations or generating video in their voice, the harm extends far beyond financial loss.

It argues that if platforms can freely treat a person's voice and expression as training data under "transformative use," human identity itself becomes a commodity for platforms to exploit, undercutting Article 21's promise of dignity.