The online “auction” of Muslim women was a “meticulously strategic hate crime”, said an open letter addressed to Chief Justice of India NV Ramana who appeals to them to take suo moto cognizance of the incident.
Photos of over 100 Muslim women, including prominent journalists, activists and thinkers, were uploaded to an app called “Bully Bai” on Github and later “auctioned” as domestic servants on January 1, 2022. This is the fifth time in six months. that such sales have taken place online. Since May 2021, “auctions” have been held on YouTube, another app “Sully Deals” on GitHub, Twitter, and a social audio app called Clubhouse.
“Given the colossal failure of the state machinery to adequately respond to such instances of hate crimes in the country, it is now up to the Supreme Court to urgently intervene to protect the constitutional rights of minority communities and restore public confidence in the constitutional system.” responsibility to do so.” Reads the letter which has been endorsed by more than 5,000 activists, intellectuals and lawyers, among others.
The signatories have demanded that the apex court monitor the investigation and prosecution of these crimes, ensure that platforms like Twitter and GitHub are not used for such illegal activities and that the victims of these communal hate crimes are compensated appropriately. Go.
After the latest auction, FIRs have been registered in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. While Mumbai Police has made three arrests, Delhi Police has not taken any action so far. No arrests have been made so far in the FIR lodged in July 2021 after the “sale” on the Bulli Bai app. The women who have been targeted say that the police action has encouraged the people behind the attacks.
“Public auction of Muslim women is an extreme form of slander of Muslims. It only points to complete moral bankruptcy in our society where communal elements openly target, threaten and deliver dangerous impunity for sexual violence against women. Read with the public’s call for massacres on the streets of Delhi early last year, and more recently at the Dharma Sansad in Haridwar, it is clear that such instances are carefully guarded hate crimes,” the letter adds.
It underlined that the auction was an attempt to “humiliate, dehumanize, defame and degrade” Muslim women and that Muslims were systematically being denied the opportunity to participate freely in public life as many of the attacks were followed by The women were forced to delete their social media profiles. ,
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