PM Modi Touching Iranian President's Feet? Is It Real?

What the video claimed

The clip, shared on X and archived for the record, showed what appeared to be Prime Minister Modi bending down to touch Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian's feet — a gesture loaded with cultural and political meaning — supposedly as a thank-you during the recently concluded BRICS Summit 2026. It circulated without any credible news outlet reporting the moment, which was the first sign something didn't add up.

What actually happened

A press release published by India's Prime Minister's Office on September 11, 2026 documents the real meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the summit. According to that release, Modi thanked Pezeshkian for Iran's consistent, high-level participation in BRICS-related meetings and for joining the Leaders' Session of the BRICS Business Forum. The two also discussed bilateral relations and recent developments in West Asia. Nowhere does the official record mention or imply the gesture shown in the video.

The giveaway: an AI tool's own watermark

A closer look at the footage turned up something the people who spread it apparently missed — a visible "Pixverse.ai" inscription baked into the video. Pixverse is a publicly available AI video generation tool, and its watermark showing up in footage presented as real news is about as direct a tell as fact-checkers get.

How the detection tools confirmed it

To back up what the watermark already suggested, the video was run through multiple detection tools. Hive Moderation returned the strongest signal, scoring the clip over 99% AI-generated. DetectVideo.ai came in at 66% AI-generated. UncovAI's analysis also pointed to the video being AI-made, adding independent confirmation from a third tool built specifically to catch this kind of synthetic media.

Three separate tools, three separate methodologies, one conclusion. That kind of convergence — visual watermark evidence plus multiple independent detection scores — is exactly the layered approach serious fact-checking teams use before publishing a verdict, rather than relying on a single score in isolation.

Why this one spread

A fabricated gesture between two heads of state during a live, high-profile summit is built to travel — it implies a power dynamic or a diplomatic subtext without a single word of text needed. Pairing that with a real, ongoing event people were already following, the same way the fake gets a head start before anyone checks the official record. It's a pattern that shows up again and again around major summits and diplomatic meetings: real setting, fabricated moment, released while attention is highest.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

This case was investigated and reported by Newschecker, a fact-checking network covering India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, which verified the claim against the official Prime Minister's Office press release and ran the video through Hive Moderation, DetectVideo.ai, and UncovAI.