Police in India have announced that they will file charges
against a man who they claim developed an app that advertised more than 80
Muslim women's images for "sale" online last year.
Aumkareshwar Thakur, 25, will now be put on trial after Delhi's Lieutenant-Governor VK Saxena approved the request.
In July 2021, the open source application Sulli Deals was hosted on the website GitHub.
After being detained in January 2022, Mr. Thakur received
bail in March.
Mr. Thakur, who has a degree in computer applications, was
apprehended by a Delhi police squad assembled to look into significant crimes
in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, in the state's central region.
The Indian Information Technology Act, several provisions of
the Indian Penal Code, and section 196 of the Criminal Procedure Code were used
by the police to file proceedings against him.
Invoked typically against high-ranking government officials,
Section 196 deals with "offences committed against the state" rather
than a person and requires approval from the federal or state government to
continue.
Sulli Bargain has constructed profiles for Muslim women
using their publicly available images and labelled them as "deals of the
day."
Neeraj Bishnoi, 20, who is accused of developing the Bulli
Bai app, which had more than 100 Muslim women's images submitted and was also
posted on GitHub, and Mr. Thakur were both detained.
In all instances, there was no real sale; rather, the goal
was to denigrate and humiliate Muslim women, many of whom have spoken out
against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party and government's denials of the
charge that Hindu nationalism is surging under his leadership.
Critics claim that because of India's divisive political atmosphere,
internet harassment of Muslim women has gotten worse in recent years.
According to a 2018 Amnesty International research on online
harassment in India, women who were more outspoken were more likely to be
targeted. The severity of this worsened for women from underrepresented castes
and religious minorities.
All of the Muslims highlighted on both applications were outspoken; they included journalists, activists, artists, and researchers.
A commercial pilot whose image was posted on Sulli Deals told the BBC that when she first learned about the app, she had "chills" down her spine.
The judge had stated that Mr. Thakur was not a flight risk
and was not in a position to sway the inquiry when granting him bail in March.