Written by Ahana,
Gujarat National Law University,
May 2026
India has seen some busy years in terms of personality rights jurisprudence. From Amitabh Bachchan to Sadhguru to Acharya Balkrishna, the Delhi High Court has issued injunctions galore to protect public personalities against AI-based impersonation and deepfakes. What appears to be an encouraging development from the perspective of rights jurisprudence is, in fact, far from that; it is a case of over-protection where the over-reach benefits the living and the absence harms the dead.
In what follows, it will be argued that there exists a defect in India’s personality rights jurisprudence in the age of AI which remains unaddressed, and that a legislative approach is required to solve it.
The Overreach Problem: Too Much Shield for the Living
During the past couple of years, via a series of liberal interim orders, the Delhi High Court has permitted personality rights to slowly evolve from its economic roots and move towards granting an open-ended licence to personalities to regulate how they are portrayed, despite the detrimental effect on freedom of expression.
This can be best illustrated by the March 2026 Balkrishna order. The appellant, Acharya Balkrishna, filed a petition before the court on account of the alleged abuse of his personality rights via deepfake videos; however, the material that he wanted to delete also involved news articles written by reputable publications and satire pieces related to the Supreme Court’s negative orders against Patanjali’s false medical claims.
That’s not all. The exact same trend has been seen again and again in the Ankur Warikoo order, the Karan Johar order, and even the Mohan Babu order. The issue here, once again, is a consequence of the lack of a statutory personality rights regime in India, which makes it impossible for the courts to rely on any exception to personality rights when considering issues of satire, parody, or journalism.
The end result is an extremely problematic precedent where two totally different forms of damage in one case, a deepfake advertisement falsely associating a celebrity with a product, and in another case, a parodic meme making fun of a public figure’s behaviour receive exactly the same kind of protection in the form of an injunction.
The Vacuum Below: No Protections for the Dead
Whereas Indian courts have been busy extending personality rights to the living, they have been unambiguous about personality rights to the deceased: there are none.
In Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi (2023)[1], the Delhi High Court stated that both the right to privacy and the right to publicity lapse upon the death of the individual meaning that deceased celebrities have no claim on protections against AI cloning. The rationale behind such decision-making was the age-old common law maxim actio personalis moritur cum persona, which means that personal rights die along with the individual.
This logic may seem intuitive in a pre-AI world but it makes very little sense now. Current generative artificial intelligence software can recreate a deceased person’s voice from their previous audio recordings with 95 percent accuracy, create their image using photographs and mimic their gestures based on past video material. This way, for instance, a deceased actor could endorse some product, a deceased politician give an election speech and a deceased musician release a new album.
At this very moment, India finds itself at a crucial crossroads the nature of modern technology makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the interests of personality can, and do, survive after the individual’s death. And yet, our laws have nothing to say about what a family should do if the image of their loved one has been used for commercial gain, leaving no legal recourse for the family members.
That’s precisely where the recently proposed IT Rules Amendment (November 2025)[2], despite its numerous strengths related to mandating labeling of AI-created content, falls flat on its face. The amendment places obligations on those platforms creating synthetic content, but does not say anything regarding the existence of rights for the person featured if said individual is deceased. While it would be possible to force the platform to label a fake featuring a celebrity alive and kicking, there is nothing that could be done about removing that of the deceased one.
Asymmetry, Explained Simply
In conclusion, India’s situation right now could be summarized as follows: a living celebrity can get an injunction on the whole internet, metaverse, and blockchain for memes, while a family member of a dead celebrity cannot sue for a false depiction of the deceased in an AI-generated video, which shows the dead person as a product endorser. Courts that have stretched personality rights beyond recognition when it comes to living people will not recognize these personality rights in any form when it comes to dead people.
This makes no legal sense whatsoever. It’s just an oddity of legal doctrine development, personality rights are created incrementally by cases involving living individuals, and there was never a chance for a dead person to enter a courtroom.
Targeted Solution, Not a Broader one
The issue is not to implement the overly broad judicial approach that has led to overreaches in respect of the living. The solution lies in legislative precision for both ends of the asymmetry.
Regarding the living, the UK Parliament ought to introduce legislation dealing with personality rights with an express statutory exception to satire, parody, reporting of current events, and criticism, adopting the proportionality test of the European Union AI Act and the limited exception under the US TAKE IT DOWN Act of 2025.[3] Courts should not be issuing sweeping injunctions against memes or journalism; legislation can solve this issue through a requirement for commercial misappropriation.
However, in terms of posthumous protections for the deceased, the remedy would be much more narrowly tailored, specifically an amendment to the IT Rules 2025, making explicit the application of SGI to content depicting deceased persons, along with a statutory right of standing for legal heirs for a period of twenty years would be a good place to start enabling them to request takedown and sue for commercial misuse. This does not equate to the expansive quasi-property rights approach adopted by some nations, which may have the effect of chilling historical and artistic analysis. Instead, it is an appropriately limited, time-limited, and commercially motivated remedy sufficient to block a deepfake ad, but certainly not a documentary about history.
The recent Danish proposal to amend their Copyright Act and include identity rights within copyright for fifty years post-mortem while facing substantial criticism due to concerns around excessive protection, and the potential chilling effect on free expression provides an example India need not follow.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Indian story on the right to personality in the age of artificial intelligence presents a scenario of two concurrent failures heading in opposite directions. The judiciary has created for its living individuals a tool so powerful it stifles speech. It has made the dead incapable of defending themselves from exploitation through commercial enterprises. The law requires something to be done to solve this dilemma.
The legislative body has all the instruments needed to achieve that purpose. The IT Rules, the proposed legislation on deepfake, and the DPDP Act[4] all provide the necessary means. All it needs is a will to address the matter of AI-driven damage to the right to personality as a structural legal issue rather than a starry concern.
References
[1] Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi, 2023 SCC OnLine Del 3997 (India).
[2] Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2025, Gazette of India, pt. II sec. 3(i), No. G.S.R. 775(E) (Oct. 22, 2025) (effective Nov. 15, 2025) (India).
[3] TAKE IT DOWN Act, Pub. L. No. 119-12, 139 Stat. 55 (2025).
[4] Digital Personal Data Protection Act, No. 22 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India).
