#FactCheck-Old Maharashtra Video of Dancing Policemen Falsely Linked to West Bengal Election Results

Introduction

Company law solved a version of this problem more than a century ago, and artificial intelligence regulation is now quietly borrowing the solution. When something goes wrong inside a company, the law generally cannot reach past the corporate entity to punish the people who ran it, because the company is treated as a legal person entirely separate from its shareholders and directors. Courts developed an exception for exactly the cases where that separation becomes a shield for wrongdoing, and lawyers now call it lifting, or piercing, the corporate veil. A growing body of legal scholarship argues that AI systems present a strikingly similar problem, and needs a strikingly similar fix. That emerging idea has come to be called lifting the AI veil.

Where the original doctrine comes from

The doctrine of lifting the corporate veil traces directly to the House of Lords decision in Salomon v. Salomon & Co. Ltd. in 1897. Aron Salomon, a leather and boot manufacturer, incorporated his existing business, sold it to the new company, and structured share ownership so that he and his family held nearly all the shares. When the company later failed, creditors argued Salomon should be held personally liable, since the company was effectively just him operating under a different name. The House of Lords disagreed, holding decisively that once validly incorporated, a company is a person in law entirely distinct from its subscribers, with its own rights and liabilities. That ruling established what remains company law's foundational principle: separate legal personality.

Separate personality is not, however, unconditional. Courts across common law jurisdictions, including India, carved out an exception for cases where the corporate form is used as a facade for fraud, to evade a statutory obligation, or to circumvent a legal duty that would otherwise apply to the individuals behind it. In such cases, a court will "lift the veil," looking past the company's separate legal identity to attribute liability directly to the directors or shareholders actually in control. India's Supreme Court, in Life Insurance Corporation of India v. Escorts Ltd., reaffirmed that this remains an exception applied only in narrow, exceptional circumstances, generally where a statute contemplates it, or fraud or improper conduct needs to be prevented. The doctrine has since found application well beyond fraud alone, including in tax matters, as seen in cases like State of U.P. v. Renusagar Power Co., where courts treated closely related corporate entities as one for the purpose of a specific statutory benefit.

Why AI creates the same structural problem

Scholarship examining AI liability has increasingly pointed to a near identical structural gap. As AI systems take on functions once reserved for human decision makers, board level analytics, automated lending decisions, algorithmic hiring, even proposed "robo-director" advisory roles, a familiar question resurfaces: who answers for the outcome when the AI system, rather than a named individual, produced the decision. A 2025 academic paper titled Lifting the AI Veil in Company Law argues explicitly that AI liability should be approached through an extension of existing doctrines, including directors' duty of care and precisely the piercing of the veil doctrine traditionally reserved for shareholders, rather than inventing an entirely new liability regime from scratch.

The concern driving this argument is not abstract. Commentary in outlets like MIT Technology Review has warned that granting AI systems anything resembling legal personhood risks handing companies a genuinely dangerous new shield, allowing a company to argue that a harmful outcome was the AI's autonomous decision, disconnected from any human actor's intent or negligence, much as a company might once have argued a harmful outcome was simply "the company's" doing and not any individual's. Critics of AI personhood proposals, writing in journals examining AI as legal persons, make the parallel explicit: while corporate veil piercing exists precisely to stop the corporate form being misused as a liability shield, the justification for extending similar legal personhood to AI is considerably weaker, since corporate personhood serves a clear economic purpose, enabling investment and risk pooling, that AI personhood does not obviously replicate.

How regulators have actually responded

The European Union's experience is instructive precisely because it shows the doctrine's underlying logic being adopted through legislation rather than judicial precedent. The European Commission originally proposed a dedicated AI Liability Directive in September 2022, intended to ease the burden of proof on claimants harmed by AI systems, including a rebuttable presumption of causality where a claimant could show an AI system breached EU AI Act obligations. That proposal was formally withdrawn in 2025, with the withdrawal notice published in the Official Journal on 6 October 2025, after member states failed to reach agreement. In its place, the revised EU Product Liability Directive now does much of the same underlying work through a different legal mechanism, explicitly treating AI software as a "product" for the purposes of manufacturer liability, meaning AI providers face strict liability for defective AI products without claimants needing to prove fault, applicable to AI products placed on the EU market from 9 December 2026 onward. Functionally, this achieves something close to piercing the AI veil by statute: instead of allowing a company to attribute harm to an autonomous algorithmic process and stop the inquiry there, liability is anchored back to the entity that built, trained, or deployed the system.

The Indian angle, and why it matters here

India has no AI specific liability statute at present, and no reported judicial decision has yet applied the corporate veil piercing doctrine by analogy to an AI system. But the underlying legal architecture is already familiar territory for Indian courts. India's jurisprudence on lifting the corporate veil, built through Escorts, Renusagar, and subsequent cases, already establishes the judicial comfort with looking past a formal legal structure to find the real, controlling actor when justice demands it. Indian courts have been consistently clear that this remains an exceptional remedy rather than a routine one, generally invoked where a statute contemplates it, where fraud or improper conduct needs to be prevented, or where a taxing or beneficial statute would otherwise be defeated by rigid adherence to corporate form. That same cautious, fact specific posture is likely to shape how any future Indian AI liability doctrine develops, applied sparingly rather than as a blanket rule.

As AI systems increasingly mediate lending decisions, insurance claims processing, and algorithmic hiring in Indian companies, the same reasoning that let Indian courts see through a corporate facade could plausibly extend to seeing through an "AI made the decision" defence, attributing responsibility to whichever human actor, developer, deployer, or governing board, exercised actual control over how that system was built and used. Given how central technology sector employment and AI deployment already are to India's economy, the absence of a clear domestic answer to this question is unlikely to remain untested for long.

The larger point

The doctrine of lifting the AI veil is less a wholly new legal invention and more a recognition that AI systems and corporations create the same essential problem: a formally separate entity that can, if left unchecked, absorb blame that properly belongs to the humans directing it. Company law solved this by refusing to let the corporate form become an alibi. AI law, whether through judicial doctrine, statute, or a hybrid of both as the EU's experience suggests, will likely need to reach the same conclusion, because the alternative is allowing genuine harm to disappear into a system nobody can be made to answer for.

References

1. Bird & Bird, "Proposed EU AI liability rules withdrawn." https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/proposed-eu-ai-liability-rules-withdrawn
2. LegalClarity, "AI Liability Directive: What It Was and Why It Was Withdrawn." https://legalclarity.org/ai-liability-directive-what-it-was-and-why-it-was-withdrawn/
3. WCR Legal, "EU AI Liability Directive: Withdrawn, What Now Applies?" https://wcr.legal/eu-ai-liability-directive-withdrawn-pld/
4.  Verfassungsblog, "Anatomy of a Fall: On the Anticipated Withdrawal of the AI Liability Directive Proposal." https://verfassungsblog.de/anatomy-of-a-fall-aiact-aild-pld/
5. MIT Technology Review, "Debates over AI consciousness are a trap." https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/20/1142571/ai-consciousness-debate-trap/
6. ResearchGate, "Lifting the AI Veil in Company Law." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393305638_Lifting_the_AI_veil_in_company_law
7. Review of Law and Regulation, "Lifting the AI Veil in Company Law." https://rlr.iup.rs/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/04.pdf
8.  Bhatt & Joshi Associates, "Decoding the Jurisprudence on Lifting the Corporate Veil in Indian Court. https://bhattandjoshiassociates.com/decoding-the-jurisprudence-on-lifting-the-corporate-veil-in-indian-court/
9. Mondaq, "Analysis Of Standard Of Proof For Lifting Of The Corporate Veil In Cases Of Fraud." https://www.mondaq.com/india/corporate-and-company-law/1259382/analysis-of-standard-of-proof-for-lifting-of-the-corporate-veil-in-cases-of-fraud
10. Record Of Law, "Analysis of the theory of corporate veil lifting." https://recordoflaw.in/analysis-of-the-theory-of-corporate-veil-lifting/
11. Suren Uppal Offices, "Lifting of Corporate Veil: Navigating Judicial Precedents." https://www.suolaw.com/lifting-of-corporate-veil-navigating-judicial-precedents/

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Executive Summary

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A viral social media post featuring a picture of former Chief Election Commissioner Achal Kumar Jyoti claims he served as the chairman of the company manufacturing EVM microchips and altered EVM settings at the behest of PM Modi. According to a research done by CyberPeace's research wing, the claim that former Chief Election Commissioner Achal Kumar Jyoti was the chairman of an EVM chip manufacturing company and altered EVMs at the behest of PM Modi is completely false. 

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Claim 

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Social media posts circulated statements claiming: "PM Modi ordered EVM tampering; the company manufacturing EVM memory chips confessed. Will the SC take note, cancel all elections from 2014 to 2019, and send Modi to life imprisonment?"

https://x.com/RatnakarGedam/status/2090639442411470936?s=20 

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Fact-Check

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Relevant keyword searches yield no credible news reports, official statements, or legal documentation supporting claims that Achal Kumar Jyoti tampered with EVMs or issued any such confession. Achal Kumar Jyoti served as the Chief Election Commissioner of India from July 6, 2017, to January 22, 2018. Prior to this, he was a 1975-batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre who served in various administrative roles, including Chief Secretary of Gujarat.

https://www.eci.gov.in/former-cec-ec?utm_source 

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According to official information, Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) used in Indian elections are manufactured exclusively by two Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs): Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL). Official records confirm that Achal Kumar Jyoti was never appointed as the Chairman or Director of BEL, ECIL, or any entity manufacturing microchips for EVMs.

https://www.eci.gov.in/evm-faqs/?utm_source

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Conclusion

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The claim that former Chief Election Commissioner Achal Kumar Jyoti headed an EVM chip manufacturing company and tampered with voting machines is completely fabricated and baseless.

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Executive Summary:

The photograph of a bridge allegedly in Mumbai, India circulated through social media was found to be false. Through investigations such as reverse image searches, examination of similar videos, and comparison with reputable news sources and google images,  it has been found that the bridge in the viral photo is  the Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge located in Qingdao, China. Multiple pieces of evidence, including matching architectural features and corroborating videos tell us that the bridge is not from Mumbai. No credible reports or sources have been found to prove the existence of a similar bridge in Mumbai. 

Claims:

Social media users claim a viral image of the bridge is from Mumbai.

Fact Check:

Once the image was received, it was investigated under the reverse image search to find any lead or any information related to it. We found an image published by Mirror News media outlet, though we are still unsure but we can see the same upper pillars and the foundation pillars with the same color i.e white in the viral image. 

The name of the Bridge is Jiaozhou Bay Bridge located in China, which connects the eastern port city of the country to an offshore island named Huangdao.

Taking a cue from this we then searched for the Bridge to find any other relatable images or videos. We found a YouTube Video uploaded by a channel named xuxiaopang, which has some similar structures like pillars and road design. 

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In reverse image search, we found another news article that tells about the same bridge in China, which is more likely similar looking.

Upon lack of evidence and credible sources for opening a similar bridge in Mumbai, and after a thorough investigation we concluded that the claim made in the viral image is misleading and false. It’s a bridge located in China not in Mumbai.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, after fact-checking it was found that the viral image of the bridge allegedly in Mumbai, India was claimed to be false. The bridge in the picture climbed to be  Qingdao Jiaozhou Bay Bridge actually happened to be located in Qingdao, China.  Several sources such as reverse image searches, videos, and reliable news outlets prove the same. No evidence exists to suggest that there is such a bridge like that in Mumbai. Therefore, this claim is false because the actual bridge is in China, not in Mumbai.

• Claim: The bridge seen in the popular social media posts is in Mumbai.
• Claimed on: X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, 
• Fact Check: Fake & Misleading

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