Indian police have arrested the alleged creator of an app that shared photos of over 100 Muslim women saying they were “on-sale”. 20-year-old Neeraj Bishnoi is the fourth person to be arrested in this case.
The app – “Bully Bai” – was hosted on GitHub, which has since been removed amid widespread anger and outrage. This was the second attempt in months to harass Muslim women by sharing photos of them in fake auctions.
In July last year, an app and website called “Sully Deals” created profiles of more than 80 Muslim women – using photos they uploaded online – and described them as “the deals of the day”. Though the police have started an investigation, no case has been registered against anyone yet.
‘I was put up for sale online because I was a Muslim’
Police in at least three states have started investigating the “bully bai” app based on complaints from targeted women.
A special unit of the Delhi Police dealing with cybercrime arrested Mr. Bishnoi in the north-eastern state of Assam on Thursday. “He is the main conspirator and creator of the app,” KPS Malhotra, deputy commissioner of the cybercrime team, told the BBC.
Police also said that Mr. Bishnoi used to run the main Twitter handle which shared the pictures from the app. Earlier this week, Mumbai Police arrested three others – Vishal Kumar, a 21-year-old engineering student in the southern city of Bangalore, and two other students, Shweta Singh, 18, and Mayank Rawat, 21, in the northern state of Uttarakhand. . , A GitHub spokesperson said the company had suspended a user account on the app for “everyone found to be in violation of our policies.”
Mumbai Police Commissioner Hemant Nagrale told BBC Marathi: “Our investigation is at a premature stage, so we can’t say right now whether “Bully Bai” and “Sully Deal” are linked. In both cases, there was no actual sale, but it was intended to demean and humiliate Muslim women – many of whom have been vocal about the rising tide of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Sulli” is a derogatory Hindi slang term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women, and “bully” is also derogatory. Maharashtra state junior home minister Satej Patel told the BBC: “A few more people have been detained for questioning. We will investigate the matter to its logical end.”
The list of women on the app includes several journalists, a Bollywood actor, and the 65-year-old mother of a missing Indian student. The fake auction left people stunned after several women shared screenshots and messages on social media.
Quratulain Rahbar, a Kashmiri journalist who reported on the website “Sulli Deals” last year, said it was disgusting to have the name on the app this time.
Priyanka Chaturvedi, a lawmaker from the Shiv Sena party, told ANI news agency that the new app was created because the makers of the “Sulli Deals” website hadn’t been punished yet. The parliamentarian also shared letters written to Mr. Vaishnav after the website came to light in July 2021.
A 2018 Amnesty International report on online harassment in India showed that the more outspoken a woman was, the more likely she was to be targeted – the scale went up for women from religious minorities and disadvantaged castes.
Critics say trolling against Muslim women has worsened in recent years in India’s polarized political climate.
