Pakistan, in a statement issued by the foreign office on Tuesday, strongly condemned the social media campaign in India featuring various prominent Muslim women for “sale” through a fake online auction app named “Bulli Bai”. The cases have sparked anger and outrage across the country.
Bulli Bai is an open source app hosted on the web platform GitHub on which photographs of over 100 Muslim women, including activists, journalists, politicians, and even the highly praised Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi, were displayed without their consent, to put them up for auction.
“Pakistan strongly condemns the despicable and totally unacceptable harassment and insult of Muslim women on the Internet and purpose-built online application in India,” the Pakistani foreign office mentioned in the statement, “Their doctored images have been placed on the Internet application with outrageous captions for ‘auction.’ Hate-mongering followers of such applications attacked the dignity of nearly 100 influential Muslim women by ‘bidding’ on them with deeply offensive remarks.”
The fake auction website Bulli Bai, which has since been taken down, takes its name from derogatory slang against Muslim women.
It is to be noted that the case is the second attempt in less than a year to harass Muslim women. Last year, in July, a “Sulli Deals” named app and website created profiles of nearly 80 Muslim women using the photos they had uploaded online and offered them for sale under the headline “deals of the day”.
The Muslim women displayed on Bulli Bai have said the auction was meant to humiliate them, as many of them have raised voices against Hindu nationalism in India and certain policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
The fake auction let loose outrage on Twitter after complaints from the victims, with numerous women posting screenshots after finding their pictures recorded on the website.
Women rights activists and politicians from opposition parties admonished the governing Bharatiya Janata Party to take strict action against online harassment of Muslim women, prompting Indian technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to assure stern measures.
Police in at least three Indian states said they have opened investigations into the incident and filed criminal complaints against creators of the website, based on the complaints of the directed women.