India’s police say they have arrested a 20-year-old man they suspect created an online app that shared pictures of Muslim women for a virtual “auction”, as an investigation into the case of religious hatred widens.
An open-source app on the Microsoft-owned Github platform called “Bulli Bai” – a derogatory term to describe Muslim women – had shared pictures of dozens of women without their consent before it was taken down a week ago.
K P S Malhotra was a New Delhi police official who said on Thursday that his team had taken Niraj Bishnoi, an engineering student from Jorhat in northeastern Assam. This was after a probe that involved state-run Computer Emergency Response Team.
“He is the person who had created the Bulli Bai app on Github. He had also created the Twitter handle @bullibai_ and other handles,” Malhotra said.
Police in the western city of Mumbai, who are also investigating the app, have separately arrested three people this week, including two 21-year-old engineering students – Vishal Kumar and Mayank Rawal – and Shweta Singh, a 19-year-old woman.
Mumbai police said they were investigating whether the app, which did not involve any actual auctioning of people, was part of a “larger conspiracy”.
‘Absolutely chilling’
Several Indian Muslim journalists were targeted by the app, including Ismat Ara who filed and then shared on social media a police complaint on Sunday that said the app was “designed to insult Muslim women”.
“After today’s arrest by @DelhiPolice, I hope the culprits behind this elaborate harassment of Muslim women, including journalists like myself, will ultimately be caught & punished,” Ara said in a tweet on Thursday.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) described the app as “absolutely chilling” and urged Indian authorities to take action.
“To do nothing would be to condone an extremely violent form of harassment, a form of intimidation that discriminates against an entire sector of the journalistic community and exposes those targeted to potential physical attacks,” RSF’s Daniel Bastard said.
Singh, the youngest of those arrested so far in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app case, is from the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
After completing her school-leaving exams last fall, the 19-year-old started using social media and made contact via it with right-wing Hindu users, according to a local police official.
According to the official, Singh told him her actions were based in Hindu right-wing ideology. She had picked up this ideology on social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter.
“She came to social media to distract herself but she kept getting entangled in it,” the official said.
Muslims, who account for about 14 percent of India’s 1.3 billion population, have witnessed a rise in religious hatred and violence since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 and was re-elected with a bigger majority in 2019.
In July last year, a similar app, named ‘Sulli Deals’, also on GitHub, had put nearly 80 Muslim women “for sale”. This case has not seen any arrests.
Many women who have appeared on both of these apps have in the past criticised the rise of Hindu nationalism as well as the treatment of Indian minorities.
Source: rnewtimes