new year, people decided to take the entire concept of objectifying women to a whole new level. Imagine waking up to your picture being used to attract bids on the internet in a country that has approximately 825 million internet users. Bone-chilling, isn’t it? This was the gruesome reality for several Muslim women in India last week, as they discovered an open-source app named ‘Bulli Bai’ being used to auction them online. It brought back the horrors from last year as society had to deal with Sulli Deals, a similar app comprising profiles of Muslim women and stooped as low as to label them as ‘deal of the day.’ This situation makes me wonder why women in our country had to go through this despicable experience not just once, but twice within a short span of seven months.

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The Bulli Bai fiasco has not come as a shock to us because cybercrime has been on the rise for the past two years. Bulli Bai caught people’s attention on Twitter as doctored images of prominent Muslim women, including journalists, were offered for sale online on the Github hosting site. These photos were illegally obtained from the women's social media handles and the users were asked to take part in the auction of these women. It was promoted by a Twitter handle with the same name shamelessly stating that women can be “booked” through this app. Hundreds of women fell prey to this derogation and distress. Let us now analyse the impact of the situation at hand.

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REACTION TO THE EVENT 

The social, legal, and political reaction to Bulli Bai is both a beacon of hope as well as a somewhat underwhelming response to the incident. The women who were the targets of this hate crime appeared on various news platforms, claiming that the reasons that they were targeted were threefold. In addition to being women and Muslims, they were vocal; vocal about important issues such as the Citizenship Amendment Bill and right-wing Hindu extremism. They weren’t just Muslim women. They were Muslim women trying to make a difference. A 2018 Amnesty International report showed that the more vocal a woman is in India, the more likely she is to be the target of online harassment. The alleged objective of this entire website was to induce fear amongst these women; to show them that being outspoken and speaking up for fairness and equality carries a patriarchal and communal brand of punishment. But these women also vowed that despite their outrage, they weren’t lessened by the attempted shaming. Instead of giving in, they were more emboldened to continue empowering other women. 

 

The political response was less inspiring. In Maharashtra, the State government expressed greater commitment to ensuring justice, by pledging full support to the Mumbai Police and through statements made by at least three leaders of the Shiv Sena and Congress Party coalition, including Priyanka Chaturvedi and Satej Patil. In Delhi, although the same procedure was followed by the Police, the relative silence from the Delhi political leadership left many women unsatisfied and unheard. 

 

The legal response has also been a mixed bag. Under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which deals with the transmission of ‘obscene material’ in electronic form, the maximum punishment that the four accused could be facing is three years in prison. If the prosecution makes a case under the harder-to-prove Sec. 67A of the IT Act, then the maximum punishment awaiting the accused becomes five years in prison. This shows that India doesn’t really have a stringent law on such acts of cyber-harassment paired with religious bigotry and misogyny. The investigation also resulted in renewed interest in the Sulli Deals case. In the Sulli Deals case, the Delhi and Noida Police’s investigation reached a dead end after they alleged that they could not secure compliance from GitHub due to it being a foreign entity. Unlike the Delhi Police, the Mumbai Police used India’s Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) with the US to ensure swift compliance from the company, indicating greater political will this time around. Legal Scholar Faizan Mustafa called the incident an act of hate speech, and recognized the growing need to regulate open-source platforms like GitHub, saying that they cannot evade accountability for such content. 

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STATUS OF POLICE COMPLAINTS

Victims from three cities, Mumbai, New Delhi and Hyderabad have filed police complaints in their respective cities under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860, and the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000. Three police complaints by victims in New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad have led to cases against unknown people under different sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860, and the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000.

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In New Delhi, Journalist Ismat Arora filed a complaint to the cyber wing of the Delhi Police under IPC sections 153A (promoting enmities between groups) 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration), 354A (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman). The complaint also invoked section 66 (dishonest or fraudulent act) and 67 (punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) of the IT Act.

 

The Delhi Police registered an FIR on 2 January 2022 under IPC sections 153A, 153B, 354A and 509. The FIR, interestingly enough, did not use sections of the IT Act.

Ms. Ismat believes that the auctioning on GitHub is just another step of the orchestrated trolling that the hate mongers impose on Muslim women. Their lack of fear of any sanction fuels such impunity. She called the ‘auctioning’ an act of “conspiracy aimed at intimidating and insulting Muslim women”.

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The Mumbai police filed a case after a complaint by Sidrah, also a target of the Bulli Bai app, under IPC  sections 153(A), 153(B), 295(A) (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage reli­gious feelings), 354D (stalking), 509, 500 (punishment for defamation). The FIR also invoked section 67 of the IT Act, 2000.

 

If one were to compare the filing of complaints in Mumbai and Delhi, the procedure followed was more or less same, with the exception of invocation of IT Act. However, the Mumbai police was evidently more swift in tracing down the perpetrators. Satej D Patil, Maharashtra’s Minister of State (MoS) for Home claimed that Mumbai police had detained a 21 yr. old engineer in Bangalore. The next day they said the suspect had been identified as Vishal Kumar Jha, and that the main accused in the case was a 21-year-old woman detained from Uttarakhand. Meanwhile, in the Delhi camp, no detentions were made.

Eerily enough, the actions of police in the two cities seemed to be in proportion to the political reaction from the MVA government in Maharashtra and Central government in Delhi, hinting towards a possible political showdown over the case.

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Simultaneously, on 3 January, in Hyderabad, Parveen filed a police complaint in which she alleged that the act “seeks not only dehumanise women like me, but appear to have a nefarious design of creating wedge between communities”. She demanded action against GitHub for hosting “such dangerous, misogynistic, inflammatory and communal content”. She urged the police to investigate the “larger conspiracy against Muslim women by the people behind this action.”

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THE DRAUPADI PARADOX

While some netizens on Twitter believe that this must be dismissed as an instance of juvenile mischief, it must be noted that this is a manifestation of a much deeper systemic malice within the society, where we often look at people as members of their communities, rather than individuals first, which stems off from the communal nature of upbringing.

 

When a seven-year-old distinguishes between the hues of orange and green and their communal connotations and is threatened by green flags in a locality, this combined with religion being used as a scapegoat in every election campaign, and the radical nature of media, often gives rise to contempt; extreme but unwarranted contempt for other communities and religions. These extreme followers, who follow their distorted, radicalized version of religion, extremists amongst the right wing who use the Mahabharata and Ramayana so often to invalidate logical arguments by countering them with loosely understood and conveniently misinterpreted sections of the holy text, like a “goodly apple rotten at heart”, have assumed the role of the disdainful Duryodhan, going against the ideals of the very religion they use to justify their communalism. 

 

Whether it’s religion or politics, society finds a justification to violate women, the truth is - they are always at the receiving end. 

A nation that has grown up listening to a tale of how outraging a woman’s modesty triggered the greatest war ever fought, as a part of an important holy text, using it to justify the systemic oppression and objectification of women, is only a testament to the claim that Time is the best poet and the device of irony – its biggest strength.

 

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