One Hundred Women Listed for a Sham Auction
On New Year's Day 2022, an app hosted on GitHub posted the photographs of about 100 outspoken Indian Muslim women, framed as a mock “auction.” It followed an earlier app that had done the same, and Indian police went on to arrest several young suspects.
On 1 January 2022, an application called “Bulli Bai” appeared on GitHub, the Microsoft-owned software development platform. It displayed the photographs of about 100 Muslim women in India — among them journalists, activists and other public figures — alongside text presenting them as items for a fake online “auction,” according to Al Jazeera. The images had been taken from the women's social media accounts and used without their consent. No one was actually being sold; the purpose was harassment.
The women targeted included the Kashmiri journalist Quratulain Rehbar and the New Delhi journalist Ismat Ara, Al Jazeera reported. “It is sad to see how these hate-mongers are licensed to target Muslim women without any fear,” Ara said. The term “Bulli,” like “Sulli,” is a slur used against Muslim women.
An echo of ‘Sulli Deals’
The app closely mirrored an earlier one. In July 2021, an application called “Sulli Deals” had similarly listed around 80 Muslim women for a mock auction on GitHub, Al Jazeera reported. Six months on, no arrests had been made in that case, and complainants said technology companies had been slow to cooperate. “We got no response from Twitter, GitHub and Go-Daddy despite Mumbai Police themselves requesting them to reveal data,” the Mumbai lawyer Fatima Zohra Khan said, referring to the earlier episode.
After the Bulli Bai app drew public outrage, GitHub blocked the account behind it, and police forces in Mumbai and New Delhi registered cases.
Arrests
Within days, Mumbai police's cyber division reported a series of arrests. Those detained included Shweta Singh, 19, described as a main suspect and held in the northern state of Uttarakhand; Vishal Kumar, a 21-year-old engineering student arrested in Bengaluru; and Mayank Rawal, 21, also held in Uttarakhand, according to Al Jazeera.
Days later, Delhi police said they had arrested the app's alleged creator, Niraj Bishnoi, a 20-year-old engineering student from Jorhat in the state of Assam, Al Jazeera reported. In total, four people were arrested across the two investigations. The suspects were young, and investigators said they were examining links between the app's creators and online groups that traded in anti-Muslim material.
A pattern, not an incident
Rights advocates and the targeted women framed the apps as part of a wider effort to intimidate Muslim women who speak publicly in India, using ordinary platforms — a code repository, a social network — to stage the abuse. The absence of arrests in the Sulli Deals case months earlier, complainants argued, had signalled that such campaigns carried little cost. The Bulli Bai arrests marked a faster response, but the women listed said the episode had already achieved its aim of instilling fear.