The Delhi Police have filed detailed chargesheets in the ‘Bulli Bai’ and ‘Sulli Deals’ cases in which women belonging to the Muslim community were targeted and defamed. The cases were being probed by the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police's Special Cell. The derogatory Sulli Deals mobile app had surfaced in July 2021, where photos of Muslim women, without their consent, were put up "for auction" on the app.
Six months later, another similar incident of harassing and targeting women from the community came to light after a Delhi-based woman journalist lodged a complaint with the Delhi Police stating that she was being targeted by some unidentified group of people on a mobile application. This time, the app was named as Bulli Bai, yet again created on the US-based GitHub platform.
The prime accused in the cases, identified as Niraj Bishnoi, who created the Bulli Bai app and Aumkareshwar Thakur, creator of the Sulli Deals app, were arrested by the Delhi police on January 6 and January 8, respectively. Sources told IANS that the chargesheet, which was filed on March 4, Friday, in a local court in Delhi, contained 2,000 pages in the Bulli Bai case while in Sulli Deals case, the chargesheet was of 700 pages.
In the Sulli Deals case, the Cyber Crime Unit of the Delhi Police had registered an FIR under section 354-A (Sexual harassment and punishment for sexual harassment) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) on July 8.
However, the chargesheet has been filed under sections 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony), 153B (Imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration) and 354A(3) (Sexual harassment and punishment for sexual harassment) of the IPC, along with relevant sections of the IT Act.
Bulli Bai had a number of pictures of women, including journalists, social workers, students and famous personalities, accompanied by derogatory content. The app listed hundreds of Muslim women "for auction."
In the said case, the chargesheet against the accused Niraj Bishnoi has been filed under sections 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony), 153B (Imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration), 354A (Sexual harassment and punishment for sexual harassment) and 509 (Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) of the IPC, with sections of the IT Act.
The accused Bishnoi was held from Assam by an IFSO team led by DCP KPS Malhotra. Bishnoi is a resident of the Jorhat village of Assam and was studying in second-year of B.Tech, Computer Science.
He had, in October, created a list of women whom he wanted to defame online on his digital devices, a laptop, and cell phones. He was tracing women activists all over social media and downloading their photos. Just two days after Bishnoi's arrest, 25-year-old Aumkareshwar Thakur was apprehended from Indore in Madhya Pradesh.