The Supreme Court isn’t interested in your deepfake anxieties. Not today, anyway.

The highest court in India just gave a firm "not it" to a petition regarding a manipulated video featuring Assam’s Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma. The clip—a digital hallucination allegedly showing the CM in a violent shooting scenario—has been swirling through the digital gutter for weeks. The petitioners wanted the big guns in New Delhi to step in and set a standard. Instead, the justices looked at the file, checked the map, and asked a pointedly bureaucratic question: Why haven’t you gone to the Gauhati High Court first?

It’s a classic jurisdictional punt. It’s also a reminder that our legal systems are still trying to fight a hypersonic war with musket balls.

Let’s look at the friction. A deepfake takes about twenty minutes and a decent GPU to cook up. You can rent the computing power for the price of a mediocre sandwich. Challenging that video in the Supreme Court? That’s months of scheduling, astronomical legal fees for senior advocates, and a mountain of paperwork that probably consumes more trees than a small forest. By the time a petitioner navigates the "proper channels" from Gauhati to Delhi, the AI that generated the video will have been replaced by three newer, slicker versions. The lag isn't just a bug; it’s the whole feature.

The court’s logic is technically sound, if you still live in 1995. There’s a hierarchy for a reason. You don’t go to the CEO to complain about a broken toaster. But when the toaster is a viral video capable of swaying an election or inciting a riot in a sensitive border state, the "chain of command" feels like a cruel joke. Digital content doesn’t respect the Brahmaputra river. It doesn’t stop at state lines. It’s everywhere, all at once, saturating feeds from Dispur to Delhi before a court clerk has even finished their morning tea.

The irony is thick enough to choke on. We’re living in an era where truth is becoming a premium product, yet our primary defense mechanism is a legal process designed for the era of the telegram. The Gauhati High Court is a fine institution. But asking a regional court to solve a problem that is inherently borderless is like asking a local lifeguard to stop a rising tide. It’s a stalling tactic disguised as procedure.

And don’t expect the platforms to help. X, Meta, and whatever's left of the open web don’t care about the difference between a High Court and a Supreme Court. They care about the "share" button. A video of a sitting Chief Minister involved in a shooting is engagement gold. It’s rage-bait. It’s revenue. While the petitioners are booking flights to Assam to satisfy a jurisdictional whim, the algorithm is busy serving that video to another hundred thousand people. The cost of legal "due process" is the total surrender of the narrative to the fastest liar in the room.

We keep hearing that we need digital guardrails. But what we actually get are legal speed bumps. The SC’s refusal to entertain the plea isn’t just about workload management. It’s a symptom of a deeper discomfort. Judges, brilliant as they may be at interpreting century-old statutes, are terrified of the technical abyss. It’s easier to point at a map and say "go over there" than it is to grapple with the reality that the "evidence" is just a collection of pixels that don’t actually exist in the physical world.

There is a specific kind of cynicism in telling citizens to follow the "scenic route" of the law while the house is burning down. If the highest court in the land won't touch the implications of a high-profile political deepfake until it's spent two years ripening in a lower court, they’ve already conceded the game.

So, grab your files and head to the airport. The Gauhati High Court is waiting. Just try not to think about how many times that video will be copied, re-uploaded, and baked into the public consciousness by the time your plane touches the tarmac.

The law moves at the speed of a tired turtle; the lie moves at the speed of light. Who do you think wins that race?