(Image credit: Ashna//pixahive CC)
Harun Nasrullah
Delhi Police announced that they will prosecute a Hindu man accused of creating an online auction app of more than 100 Muslim women. Aumkareshwar Thakur, 25, will be tried in court, Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi Vinai Kumar Saxena announced on December 11.
The open-source app, Sulli Deals, was hosted on the web platform GitHub in July 2021 and included misogynistic comments.
Thakur was arrested in January but was granted bail in March.
Thakur was apprehended in Indore, Madhya Pradesh’s central state, by a Delhi police team formed to investigate serious crimes.
Thakur, a Bachelor of Computer Application degree holder, admitted that he was a member of a group on Twitter. “He admitted that he had developed the app on GitHub. After the uproar regarding the Sulli Deals app, he deleted all his social media footprints,” a senior police officer said.
The police registered cases against him under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, India’s Information Technology Act, and Section 196 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code.
Section 196 deals with “offences committed against the state,” rather than an individual, and is generally invoked against high-ranking government officials, which requires permission from the federal or state government to proceed.
Hana Khan, a commercial pilot whose name was on the list, said she was alerted to it when a friend sent her a tweet.
The tweet took her to “Sulli Deals,” an app and website that had taken publicly available pictures of women and created profiles, describing the women as “deals of the day.”
The app’s landing page had a photo of an unknown woman. On the next two pages, Khan saw photos of her friends. On the page, after that, she saw herself.
“I counted 83 names. There could be more,” she told the BBC. “They’d taken my photo from Twitter, and it had my user name. This app was running for 20 days, and we didn’t even know about it. It sent chills down my spine.”
Thakur was arrested along with Neeraj Bishnoi, 20, who had allegedly created the Bulli Bai app, which had uploaded photos of more than 100 Muslim women and was also hosted on GitHub.
In both cases, there was no actual sale; the purpose was to degrade and humiliate Muslim women, many of whom have been outspoken about the rising tide of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an accusation his party and government deny.
Critics say online trolling of Muslim women has worsened in recent years in India’s polarised political climate.
On January 11, the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, said, “Minority Muslim women in India are harassed and ‘sold’ in social media apps. Sull iDeals, a form of hate speech, must be condemned and prosecuted as soon as they occur.
All human rights of minorities need to be fully and equally protected.”
A 2018 Amnesty International report on online harassment in India showed that the more vocal a woman was, the more likely she was to be targeted.
The scale of harassment increased for women from religious minorities and disadvantaged castes. Those featured on both apps were all vocal Muslims, including journalists, activists, artists, and researchers.
