Sulli Deals’App Sale of Muslims women controversy - Burning Issues

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“Sulli”- Deal of the Day!!

Extreme case of Online abuse and Harassment
Muslim women in India were traumatised after finding their names and photographs up for auction on a mobile app.
“You wake up one morning and find yourself being auctioned off with your pictures and details”.
Well, this is no historic tale on Slave Trade of Imperialism, but a grim reality depicting digital harassment of Muslim women in India.
Hana Khan, a commercial pilot whose name was on the list, was alerted to it when a friend sent her a tweet.
The tweet took her to “Sulli Deals”, an app and website that had taken publicly available pictures of women and created profiles, describing the women as “deals of the day”.
One of the many disturbing arrays of misogyny, where photos of Muslim women especially students, activists, journalists, artists, researchers, etc. were uploaded by an unidentified extremist group on an application named “Sulli Deals” using GitHub with the sole purpose to auction off the Muslim women.
The motto of the app says it’s a ‘community-driven, open-source project.’ Once opened, the app would ask the user to click on ‘Find your Sulli Deal of the Day’.
It would then randomly display a photo of an Indian Muslim woman most likely sourced from her social media account.
‘Sulli’ is a derogatory term used to refer to Muslim women by Hindutva extremists.
The app came to light when these men started sharing their ‘deal of the day’ on Twitter, and it has since been removed by GitHub (hosting platform, with a repository of open-source codes.)
This is far from the first time that Muslim women have to be vocal about constant harassment and rape threats by extremist ideology.
The Delhi Police Special Cell has booked the creators of a mobile Application named ‘Sulli Deals’ which allegedly uploaded images of Muslim women without their prior consent and used inappropriate remarks against them.

National Commission for Women (NCW) has taken suo moto cognisance of “defunct website called ‘Sulli Deals’ on an internet platform named ‘Ghithub’ that was uploading pictures of many Muslim women including journalists, activists, analysts, artists and researchers with derogatory remarks and had put them up for auction.”
The NCW chairperson wrote to Delhi Police Commissioner, demanding a thorough probe into the matter and filing FIR under relevant sections.
Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) has also issued notice to Delhi Police seeking a detailed report in the matter.

GitHub – the web platform that hosted the open source app – shut it down quickly following complaints. “We suspended user accounts following the investigation of reports of such activity, all of which violate our policies,” the company said in a statement.
But the experience has left women scarred. Those who featured on the app were all vocal Muslims, including journalists, activists, artists or researchers. A few have since deleted their social media accounts and many others said they were afraid of further harassment.
“No matter how strong you are, but if your picture and other personal information is made public, it scares you, it disturbs you,”
In May, a YouTube channel ‘Liberal Doge Live’ whose real identity is reportedly Ritesh Jha, live-streamed the photos of Muslim women on the festival of Eid with a noxious description in Hindi that read: “Today, we will stalk women with our eyes filled with lust.”
People were bidding five rupees (67 cents; 48 pence) and 10 rupees, they were rating women based on their body parts and describing sexual acts and threatening rape
The photos that he circulated, sexualised, and made vulgar comments and bids on belonged not only to Indian Muslim women but Pakistani women as well.

What is the bigger issue here?

Online abuse has the power to “belittle, demean, intimidate and eventually silence women”.
Last week, more than 200 prominent actors, musicians, journalists and government officials from around the world wrote an open letter, urging ceos of facebook, google, tiktok and twitter to make women’s safety “a priority”.
The internet is the town square of the 21st century.
It is where debate takes place, communities are built, products are sold and reputations are made.
But the scale of online abuse means that, for too many women, these digital town squares are unsafe.”
An Amnesty International report on online harassment in India last year showed the more vocal a woman was, the more she was targeted.
And just as black women were more likely to be picked on in Britain and the United States, women from religious minorities and disadvantaged castes were harassed more in India.
A very brave lady has said “This targeted and planned attack is an attempt to take away the mic from the educated Muslim women who express their opinion and speak out against Islamophobia. It’s an attempt to silence them, to shame them, to take away the space they occupy”

For the women whose identities were taken and used by the “Sulli Deals” app, the fight for justice could be long and tough. But they are determined to have it.
“If police don’t find those who put us up for sale, I will go to the courts, I’m going to pursue it till the end.”