Indian app that put Muslim women up for sale is shut
Bulli Bai:
Police in two Indian states have registered cases after an app shared photos of more than 100 Muslim women saying they were on "sale"
Mayank Rawal, 21, was nabbed from Uttarakhand.Shweta Singh was arrested from Rudrapur , while engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha, 21, was held from Bengaluru
Police were also probing why some of the Twitter handles which promoted the app used Sikh-sounding names. Handles had names such as Khalsa Supremacist, Khalsa etc
The open source app - Bulli Bai - was hosted on web platform GitHub, which has since taken it down.
Earlier In July, an app and website called "Sulli Deals" created profiles of more than 80 Muslim women - described them as "deals of the day"
In both cases, there was no real sale of any kind - the purpose is to degrade and humiliate Muslim women by sharing their personal images.
Sulli is a derogatory Hindi slang term right-wing Hindu trolls use for Muslim women, and "bulli" is also pejorative
Journalist Ismat Ara, whose name and photo appeared on the Bulli Bai app, filed a police complaint over the weekend in Delhi
Police in Mumbai filed a second case against several Twitter handles and the developers of the app based on a complaint from another woman on the Bulli Bai list
The list included several journalists, activists, an award-winning Bollywood actor and even the mother of a university student who went missing in 2016