Six months, two apps to 'sell' Muslim women & 0 arrests

New Delhi: Even as the Delhi Police waits to get information on the users who created the SulliDeals application on GitHub to "auction off" influential Muslim women online — the same application hosting platform has found to be hosting an almost identical application under a different name — BulliBai — leading to widespread outrage over why the police had been unable to act in the SulliDeals case so far.

Last July, over 80 Muslim women were targetted, their pictures misused to "sell them" on a website. While the Delhi Police had registered a case in the matter after repeated nudges from the Delhi Commission for Women and the National Commission for Women, it has made no headway in the case.

According to replies filed with the women's rights bodies and as per officials

probing the case, the Delhi Police is yet to find a lead on the IP address used to set up the SulliDeals as they have said that GitHub is not cooperating with this information despite repeated appeals for information.

The Delhi Police have said that the American company has asked the police to approach it through a court under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty for the requisite information — leaving the Delhi Police to wait for the legal formalities to get through so that a court here can request a court in the company's jurisdiction to order the release of the information through the Ministry of External Affairs.

However, what is striking is that even months after the SulliDeals case, the police are yet to make any arrests. In fact, the UP Police had also registered a case in this matter at the time but is yet to make arrests.

This despite the fact that when the case initially surfaced, several victims had taken to

Twitter to out the accounts

that were openly sharing these posts on the social media platform.

More significantly, several of the women who were targetted in the SulliDeals case were also targetted in the most recent matter — many of whom have taken to social media to express their disappointment with the alleged inaction of the police in the matter. Even in the most recent BulliBai case, several victims put up the Twitter accounts sharing these images, which the police say they are investigating.

While the social media platform has suspended all or most of the accounts sharing this content - including the handle @bullibai, police sources have claimed that prima facie these Twitter accounts appeared to be fake but they are still probing them.

According to one of the victims, a former correspondent with an online news portal, some of the Twitter handles that propagated this content included — @wannabesigmaf, @Sage0x11, @bullibai_, @jattkhalsa7 — all of which now appear to have been suspended by Twitter.

Another victim, a researcher at Jamia Millia Islamia — wrote on Twitter that part of the blame for a second such site to appear was with the Delhi Police. She said on social media, "The policemen who took no action on the complaints filed against Sulli Deals too are perpetrators of this ongoing hate crime."

But even as the Delhi Police actively pursues GitHub for information on the application's creator, expert fact-checkers have pointed out that

the police have a better chance of accessing these culprits through their Twitter presence. Alt-New co-founder Mohammad Zubair said this on Twitter and sought for the Mumbai Police to look into this angle as well.