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A South American stylist named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her image was displayed over the news in an allegation about reported election fraud, has told that she at first thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

But then her social media exploded with activity and people started mentioning her on Instagram.

"At first it was a few random messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she explained. "Later they sent me the video where my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or some joke. But then lots of people started messaging at the same time and I realised it was real."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has not once been to India, says she searched on Google to comprehend what was going on.

The Events That Had Happened

What had taken place was the consequence of a press conference by Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he alleged Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party BJP and the Election Commission (EC) of committing voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has denied the allegations.

Some time after the media event, the election authority of Haryana shared a letter they claimed they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an oath with the names of ineligible voters "in order that necessary proceedings could be started". They did not respond to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of accusations of "vote theft" against the election authority since early August.

In his latest claims, he said his team had examined the Election Commission's voter list data and found that of the approximately 20 million voters, 2.5 million were problematic registrations - including duplicates, multiple registrations and incorrect locations. He attributed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged manipulation of the voters' list.

To prove his claims, he showed a series of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi standing in front of a big image of Nery, while another showed a compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her photos.

"Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used multiple times across multiple voter entries under different names. He described Nery as a model who had appeared on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Truth Behind the Image

The 29-year-old confirmed that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Considerably younger, but it is me. I am the person in the images."

She clarified that she was a hairdresser and not a model and that the photo was taken in March 2017 when she was 21, just outside her home. The photographer, she said, "thought I was pretty and asked to photograph of me".

Now years later, all the attention in the past two days from "individuals from India, many of them reporters", has left her scared.

"I became scared. I cannot tell if it is risky for me or if speaking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is right or incorrect because I do not know the parties involved," she expressed.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even check messages from my clients. Many journalists were contacting me. They located the number of the place where I work.

"I needed to delete the salon name from my profile because they were disturbing my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people treat it like a meme, but it is affecting me in my career."

The Camera Artist's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed by the unexpected attention. Until not long ago, he says India meant only Caminho das Índias - the 2009 Brazilian television series - to him.

He's still trying to make sense of the events of the last few days in a country thousands of miles away.

Some people had contacted to him from India a week back, asking him who the woman in the photo was, he explained.

"I didn't reply. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't been in contact with this friend in years," he said. "I thought it was a fraud. I blocked and reported it."

But since Gandhi's press conference, "the situation have exploded".

"Individuals were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I deactivated my Instagram to try to comprehend what was happening. Later I googled and understood what was happening, but at first I had no clue."

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People were making memes, like transforming it into a game show joke. It's absurd."

In 2017, Ferrero was just beginning his career as a photographer when he invited Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photo session. Ferrero said he posted the photos on his Facebook and also uploaded them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her permission.

"The photo blew up… reached around 57 million impressions," he said.

He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account but he shared screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same shoot.

"I deleted them out of concern, because the photos were being misused. I got frightened imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt violated. A lot of random people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The website was open and I uploaded like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you become alarmed. The first response is to shut everything down and figure things out later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Transformative Circumstances

Not one of Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that occurred at the other end of the world could turn their lives upside down.

When asked if all this helped uncover electoral fraud, would that be positive?

"Certainly, I think that would be positive. But I don't really know the details," he responded.

Nery who has never left the country states: "This is far from my everyday life. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, let alone in another country."