Anushka Pathak, Mumbai Uncensored, 6th January 2021:
If you’re active on social media, you must have seen the news about the whole Bulli Bai app case. Bulli Bai is an application where Muslim reporters or Muslim high profile Twitter celebrities, in general, were being targeted and ‘auctioned’ on the internet.
The culprits, 21year old Vishal Jha and 18-year-old Shweta Singh have been caught by the Mumbai police and produced before the Bandra Court on Tuesday. A boy named Neeraj Bishnoi was also caught on Thursday, with reports claiming he is the mastermind of the case. Some reports also say that Shweta is the mastermind behind the whole case and all the accused uploaded photographs of hundreds of Muslim women on the app which was hosted on the open-source software GitHub.
In a similar case in July, an application named Sulli Deals rolled out where Muslim women were being ‘auctioned’ with the tagline “Your Sulli Deal of The Day’ where the term ‘Sulli’ is a slur for Muslim women. In both cases, Muslim women have been the victim. A lot of people have claimed that the person behind the ‘Sulli Deals’ application is a Muslim man named Javed Alam who made the application to let the Muslim women play the victim card and accuse the right-wing of India for this application.
While we are talking about Muslim women here, let’s not forget about the women from the other community, that is, Hindu women. Hindu women have been a target of Muslim men or men in general since time immemorial. Hundreds of Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram groups share morphed pornographic pictures of Hindu women and auction them online using derogatory terms. But no complaint or FIR has ever been done regarding this case.
The Right-Wing of India and the traditionalists (a group of conservative people who claim to be the flag bearers of Hinduism) have been busy fighting over the internet blaming each other for the Bulli Bai application. The right-wing says traditionalists are conservative Hindu men who are behind the application while the traditionalist community claims that Vishal Jha and Shweta Singh are innocent and that the Hindu women have faced the same brunt Muslim women are facing now. While both their claims are right, a question arises in the minds of some people.
If we come to think of it, both these cases of Bulli Bai/ Sulli Deals applications and Facebook/Reddit/Telegram groups of Hindu women being sexualized have one thing in common which the majority of people are ignoring. In both cases, women, in general, are being targeted. In both cases, women are being wrongfully sexualized and objectified while using derogatory terms. In both cases, women are the victims here but everyone seems to be so engrossed in their propaganda that they have side-lined the real issue here.
Women have always been the dignity of an Indian household, be it a Muslim household or a Hindu one. Indians have made sure to protect their sisters and daughters so as to maintain the respect that they have in society. While it is right on their side to protect the women of their households, they tend to forget that women are also human beings with the same features as them. A woman or not, every human being must be protected at all costs. Even in the twenty-first century, women’s objectification has been an issue where women have shown that they are not lesser than any man in the world and can perform all the tasks that a man can.
