By Sarosh Bana, Mumbai Correspondent.
The unravelling of the case of mock online “auctions” of scores of young, and at times well-known, Muslim women highlights the deep schisms in Indian society caused by the Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that is working towards its goal of a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation).
Some of the women victims, who request anonymity, say they have never felt as threatened as in the India of today. They feel the country is fast losing its secular traditions, with its society unprecedentedly polarised by what have now become routine hate speeches, even calls for genocide, apart from lynchings and vicious verbal and physical assaults on primarily Muslims, but also Christians and the formerly “untouchable” Dalit minorities, by BJP adherents and also ministers and other party leaders.
Police investigations reveal crass communalism and misogyny to have been behind the computer apps, Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals, that uploaded photographs of the Muslim women that were sourced without their consent and doctored, with the accompanying message, “Deal of the day”. The photos were accompanied by demeaning and sexually derogatory messages about the women. This shocking instance harked back to the auctions of enslaved African men and women plantation workers in early America.
Both the apps used the hosting platform ‘GitHub’ to “auction” the women represented by the pilfered photos. Founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, P. J. Hyett, Scott Chacon and Chris Wanstrath, San Francisco-headquartered GitHub, Inc. is a provider of internet hosting for software development and version control that offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for US$7.5 billion.
Those behind Bulli Bai who have been arrested by the Mumbai Cyber Police point out that they had been inspired and encouraged by the Delhi Police’s failure in arresting 26-year-old Aumkareshwar Thakur, a resident of the ‘Newyork City township’ in the Central Indian city of Indore and the mastermind behind the similar Sulli Deals app that he created last July. Bulli Bai was created last November by a 21-year-old engineering student, Niraj Bishnoi, who updated it in December. He had been emboldened to repeat the crime by taking the source code from Thakur.
Mumbai and the state of Maharashtra of which it is the capital city are ruled by an Opposition alliance, whereas the Delhi Police reports to the BJP-led coalition.
While Thakur has been the only person caught in the Sulli Deals episode, apprehended by the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) of the Delhi Police, five others, including Bishnoi and an 18-year-old girl, have been arrested so far by the Mumbai Cyber Police on charges of being behind Bulli Bai. They were all found to be members of a fundamentalist Hindu outfit called the Trad Mahasabha (Trad Grand Assembly), as well as of other hateful Twitter groups. According to the police, these youngsters had been taught how to report an account from a rival group called Indian Muslim Twitter (IMT) and how to mask their identities by using VPN (Virtual Private Network), a technology that encrypts one’s internet traffic on unsecured networks to protect one’s online identity.
Police also discovered that in one of their chats, the group members mocked the Delhi Police, who, despite registering a First Information Report (FIR), had been incapable of tracing them as they had been “efficient enough” in concealing their identities. Bishnoi had also asked his accomplices to change the names of their Twitter handles to Sikh names to misguide the police into thinking it was people from this religious community who were behind the app.
While some of the victimised Muslim women were apolitical and inactive on social media, numerous Muslim women journalists were trolled for their high profile on social media and their regular writings on issues that apparently opposed the right-wing Hindu ideology.
There was widespread alarm recently when police refused to act against speakers at a dharam sansad (religious parliament) held in the north Indian Hindu pilgrim town of Haridwar where Hindu religious leaders and politicians called on the country’s majority Hindu community to take to arms for carrying out a genocide against the Muslim minority.
“Even if just 100 of us become soldiers and kill two million of them, we will be victorious,” proclaimed Sadhvi Annapurna Maa of the far-right Hindu Mahasabha (Grand Assembly of Hindus) before a cheering audience.
In the month since the event was organised, only two speakers have been arrested, while the others roam free as the police say they are looking into the matter.
At a recent US congressional briefing, Genocide Watch founder and director Gregory Stanton said he saw evidence of the “signs and processes” of a genocide of Muslims in India. Stanton had been credited with forecasting the massacre of the minority Tutsi community in Rwanda years before it took place in 1994.
The developments in India were also decried by former Vice President Hamid Ansari, a Muslim himself. While participating alongside four US lawmakers in a recent virtual webinar organised by the Indian American Muslim Council, Ansari expressed concern over the rise of Hindu nationalism. “In recent years, we have experienced the emergence of trends and practices that dispute the well-established principle of civic nationalism and interpose a new and imaginary practice of cultural nationalism,” he remarked.
“As the Indian government continues to target the practices of minority faiths, it creates an atmosphere where discrimination and violence can take root,” observed Democratic Senator Ed Markey. “In recent years, we have seen an uptick in online hate speeches and acts of hate, including vandalised mosques, torched churches and communal violence.”
A day later, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) targeted Ansari and the other speakers and stated that India is a robust and vibrant democracy that did not require a certificate from others.
