India’s leaders are failing to protect Muslim women from online abuse, putting them at risk of actual violence

India is known for its multiculturalism; people follow different faiths, speak different languages and believe in different values. But while communalism – a political philosophy rooted in these ethnic and cultural diversities – was once a fringe issue, today, the tensions between different groups have become a persistent feature of India’s polity, placing religious minority groups in an increasingly vulnerable position. The secularism on which the world’s largest democracy was built has been rapidly fraying, and anti-Muslim attacks in particular have become rampant across many Indian territories. More than anyone, Muslim women have paid the price for these tensions. Over the past few decades, Muslim women have been crushed under human rights abuses owing to the treacherous combination of religious intolerance, deeply ingrained gender inequalities and medieval personal laws. They suffered significantly under the practice of “triple talaq”, or instant divorce, due to patriarchal misinterpretations of their religion. They were denied their rights under family law in the Shah Bano maintenance case. And they were subjected to vicious and sadistic forms of violence during the 2002 Gujarat carnage. But women who have dared to challenge taboos and demanded punishment for gender crimes have time and again been silenced, as has been the cry for retribution and justice in all these above-mentioned cases. Despite these setbacks, Muslim women in India have neither remained quiet nor become apolitical. Instead, they have been at the forefront of some of India’s largest protest movements in recent decades. In early 2020, thousands of Muslim women blocked roads and held demonstrations to defy the new citizenship law that critics denounced as being prejudiced against Muslims. They have also been vocal in raising issues that affect their community on social media, challenging the Hindu right-wing over their Islamophobic hate crimes. But, given the constant harassment and marginalisation they face, it is hardly surprising that those same social media platforms are being weaponised against Muslim women, affecting their right to equally participate in political, social and cultural life. Under the increasingly polarised environment being fostered by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Muslim women’s safety is being routinely put at risk through online abuse, theft of privacy or sexual exploitation. Indeed, hundreds of Muslim women in India began 2022 with the discovery that doctored images of them had been uploaded alongside derogatory content onto an app called “Bulli Bai”. The app, hosted on GitHub, offered an online “auction” of the women, posting their details and photos and a “price tag”. The app can thus best be defined as a malignant and hateful instrument created with the explicit purpose of harassing and humiliating Muslim women. India’s Muslim women who speak their mind face latest troll attack This was not the first attempt by online trolls to target women from India’s Muslim community. Last July, a similar app called “Sulli Deals”– which published women’s Twitter handles and other private information along with pictures of them – surfaced. When complaints were made, the Delhi police – under direct control of the Indian central government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi – took barely any action. No suspects were questioned, nor were any arrests made, giving a free pass to the perpetrators to design another mock-auction app using the “Bulli Bai” tag. The emergence of a second online trolling app just six months after the first clearly demonstrates how the government’s unwillingness to promptly address attacks on an individual or group’s religious identity has contributed to the dehumanisation and othering of Muslims in India. And although some arrests have been made in the “Bulli Bai” case, the accused have mostly been arrested in states where the BJP is not the dominant power. The incident has taken hate crimes to a new level, allowing Muslim women to be violated virtually and offered up as a free-for-all for a bigoted mob. Let’s not forget, online gender-based violence is just as harmful as interpersonal violence. If allowed to continue, it can often lead to self-censorship by women and long-term mental health consequences. Thus, while “Bulli Bai” might not be the first instance of an app being created to degrade and humiliate Muslim women, it has cast a shadow of fear over the entire Muslim community in India by highlighting the extent to which organised virtual bullying and threats of sexualised violence are being used to silence the outspoken. As a result, many Muslim women today live in fear that online violence could translate into explicit real-life violence. Akanksha Khullar is the country coordinator for India at the Women’s Regional Network