Police in India have arrested a man suspected of creating an app that put up photos of more than 80 Muslim women for “sale” online last year.
The open source app – Sulli Deals – had been hosted on web platform GitHub in July 2021. The man was arrested days after a similar app – Bulli Bai – uploaded photos of more than 100 Muslim women.
Four students, including a 21-year-old who allegedly created the second app, were arrested.
In both cases, no actual sale took place but the purpose was to degrade and humiliate Muslim women, many of whom have been outspoken about the rising tide of Hindu nationalism taking place under the current Prime Minister.
“Sulli” is a derogatory Hindi slang term right-wing Hindu trolls use for Muslim women, and “bulli” is also pejorative.
After the Bulli Bai app generated outrage online, one of the women who had filed a police complaint in July alleged that police in the capital Delhi had not taken any action yet.
The “Sulli Deals” app had taken publicly available pictures of women and created profiles, describing the women as “deals of the day”. Those who featured on the app were all vocal Muslims, including journalists, activists, artists or researchers.
The Bulli Bai app also generated similar reactions from the women whose photos were uploaded without their permission – this included several journalists, a Bollywood actor and the 65-year-old mother of a disappeared Indian student.
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 this increased for women from religious minorities and disadvantaged castes.
Sources: BBC, Yahoo
Follow FiND iT on Facebook here.
ALSO READ: Norwegian soldiers must return used underwear due to supply shortages
