Aumkareshwar Thakur on trial for selling Muslim women online

• Aumkareshwar Thakur, 25, launched Sulli Deals to sell Muslim women’s pictures.
• He was granted bail in March and will be charged under CPC 196.

Police in India have announced that they will file charges against a Aumkareshwar Thakur 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 team 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 cases against him.

Invoked typically against high-ranking government officials, Section 196 deals with “offences committed against the state” rather than an individual and requires approval from the federal or state government to proceed.

Sulli Bargain had 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 uploaded and was also posted on GitHub, and Mr. Thakur were both detained.

In all instances, there was no actual 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 climate, internet harassment of Muslim women has gotten worse in recent years.

According to a 2018 Amnesty International report 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 Media that when she first learned about the app, she got “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.

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