Hana Khan, a commercial pilot whose name was on the list, said she was alerted when a friend sent her a tweet.
The tweet took her to “Sully Deals,” an app and website that had taken publicly available photos of women and created profiles that described women as “the deals of the day.”
The landing page of the app had a photo of an unknown woman. On the next two pages, Ms. Khan looked at pictures of her friends. After that, he saw himself on the page.
“I counted 83 names. There may be more,” she said, “They took my picture from Twitter and it had my username in it. This app had been running for 20 days and we didn’t even know about it. It chilled.” Down my spine.”
The app pretended to give users a chance to buy “Sulli” – a derogatory term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women. There was no actual auction of any kind – the purpose of the app was only to degrade and humiliate.
Ms. Khan said she was targeted because of her religion. “I am a Muslim woman who has seen and heard,” she said. “And they want to silence us.”
GitHub – the web platform hosting the open-source app – quickly shut it down after complaints. “We suspended user accounts after investigating reports of activity that all violated our policies,” the company said in a statement.
But the experience has terrified the women. Those who featured on the app were all vocal Muslims, including journalists, activists, artists, or researchers. Some have since deleted their social media accounts and many others said they fear further harassment.
Another woman told BBC Hindi service, “No matter how strong you are, but if your picture and other personal information are made public, it scares you, upsets you.”
But many of the women whose details were shared on the app took to social media to call them “guilty” and vowed to fight. A dozen have formed a WhatsApp group seeking and offering support and some of them, including Ms. Khan, have filed police complaints.
Prominent citizens, activists, and leaders have also raised their voices against harassment. Police said they have launched an investigation but declined to say who might be behind the app.
The people who built the app used fake identities, but Hasiba Amin, the social media coordinator for the opposition Congress party, blamed multiple accounts that regularly attack Muslims, especially Muslim women, and for supporting right-wing politics. claim to.
This is not the first time, Ms. Amin said, that Muslim women have been targeted in this way. On 13 May, as Muslims celebrated the festival of Eid, a YouTube channel ran an “Eid Special” – alive “auction” of Muslim women from India and Pakistan.
“People were bidding five rupees (67 cents; 48 pence) and 10 rupees, rating women based on their body parts and describing sexual acts and rape threats,” Ms. Khan he said.
Ms. Amin told me that later that day, an anonymous account tried to “auction” her on Twitter. Several others – one called @sullideals101, which has since been suspended – joined in “abusing me, body shaming and describing horrific sexual acts”, Ms. Khan said.
He believes the same people trying to auction him off on Twitter are the same people behind the Sully Deals app and YouTube channel – which has since been taken down by the platform.
Over the past week, Twitter has suspended accounts that claimed they were behind the app and that it will be back soon.
Campaigners say online abuse has the power to “humiliate, demean, intimidate, and ultimately silence” women.
Last week, more than 200 prominent actors, musicians, journalists, and government officials from around the world wrote an open letter urging CEOs of Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter to make women’s safety a “priority.”
“The Internet is the town square of the 21st century,” he wrote. “It’s where debate happens, communities are built, products are sold and reputations are built. But the scale of online abuse means that, for a lot of women, these digital town squares are unsafe.”
Last year, an Amnesty International report on online harassment in India showed that the more outspoken a woman was, the more she was targeted. And just as black women were more likely to be elected in Britain and the United States, women from religious minorities and disadvantaged castes were more harassed in India.
Writer and former Amnesty spokeswoman Nazia Erum in India said there were some Muslim women on social media who were “hunted and haunted”.
“This targeted and well-planned attack is an attempt to snatch the mike from educated Muslim women who express their opinion and speak out against Islamophobia. It is an attempt to silence them, to embarrass them, to snatch the space they have occupied.” said.
Ms. Amin said the harassers “had no fear because they know they will get away with it”.
He pointed to a number of recent cases of atrocities against Muslims encouraged by supporters of the ruling BJP party, such as a government minister who garlanded eight Hindus convicted of beating up a Muslim, and the country’s new broadcasting minister who was last called A Hindu mob was seen working in the viral video to “shoot Muslims”.
For women whose identities were captured and used by the “Sully Deals” app, the fight for justice could be a long and arduous one. But they are determined to get it.
“If the police don’t find those selling us, I will go to the courts,” Ms. Khan said. “I’m going to chase it to the end.”