- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN cops have arrested a 21-year-old man in connection with a controversial app that shared photographs of more than 100 women from the minority Muslim community saying they were on “sale”.
The accused is an engineering student from Bengaluru, India’s information technology capital, and his identity was not revealed.
The charges against the man were not clear but the police told BBC Marathi that he is a “close follower” of the Bulli Bai app.
On Tuesday (4), the police in the city of Mumbai recorded the arrested students who was detained from Bengaluru for allegedly using his Twitter handle to “share derogatory content” from the app that hosted morphed pictures and objectionable remarks targeting Muslim women.
The app was hosted on web platform GitHub, which has been taken down amid an outrage in the wake of the controversy.
Pictures of many Muslim women, including prominent journalists and activists, were used on the app without their approval and put on “sale” in a fake auction.
This is the second such attempt which has been seen in India. Last July, an app and website called “Sulli Deals” made profiles of more than 80 Muslim women by using the photographs they uploaded online and called them “deals of the day”.
In both the shocking instances, there was no real sale of any human being but the purpose was to humiliate women from the minority community, many of whom have protested the rising tide of Hindu nationalism in the country. Both the terms “Sulli” and “Bulli” are negative ones that have been used to degrade Muslim women.
While no one has been charged under the “Sulli Deals” case, Nabiya Khan, a poet who was targeted in the case, tweeted that the Delhi Police were yet to take action on her complaint after the news of the Bulli Bai app broke.
Police in at least three states in India have launched an investigation into the Bulli Bai app based on complaints by women who were dragged into the case.
On Monday, the cyber unit of the Mumbai Police detained the student in Bengaluru and he was flown to Mumbai where he was arrested the next day.
The cops told BBC that they were also interrogating a woman in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand in connection with the case.
The list of women on the Bulli Bai app included even a Bollywood actor and the 65-year-old mother of an Indian student who disappeared.
The false auction shocked many after several women who featured on the app shared screenshots and messages on the virtual space. Even journalists from the northern union territory of Jammu and Kashmir who reported on the “Sulli deals” last year said she was disgusted to be named in the app.
