Complaints mount against 'Sulli Deals' app for putting Muslim women for sale

New Delhi: Many raise complaints against the "Sulli Deals" after the Women's Commission of India directed the Delhi police to register a case against it. "Sulli Deals", the app, gathered the photos of Muslim women from their social media accounts, tweaked the collected images a little and posted them to the app for sale for users could buy them through auction.

The app pretended to offer users the chance to buy a "Sulli" - a derogatory slang term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women. The images, including the photos of celebrities, professionals, media persons, artists and activists, were posted in the app .

There was no real auction of any kind - the purpose of the app was just to degrade and humiliate. Many became aware they were victims only when someone saw the picture and informed them.

There is a widespread assertion that Sangh Parivar is behind the app which is named "Sulli Deals", in which "Sulli" is a derogatory word for Muslim Women used by Hindutva factions. The app, running in the open-source platform GitHub, has been shut down following the complaints.

The Delhi Police informed that it had sought information from GitHub regarding the app.

The Delhi Women's Commission had issued a notice to the Delhi Police yesterday and had demanded a detailed report on the matter along with a copy of the First Investigation Report within July 12. The commission said that the app contains images of several Muslim girls and women.

Hana Khan, a pilot, was one of the complainants. She said she first found her friend's pictures on the page and later saw her own photos. The pictures were there online for nearly twenty days until the app was finally shut down.

"I am a Muslim woman who is known and seen by society. So they think I should be silenced." Khan said.

"People were bidding five rupees (67 cents; 48 pence) and 10 rupees, they were rating women based on their body parts and describing sexual acts and threatening rape," Khan was quoted saying in a BBC.report.

As the issue came into the light, many women shut down their social media accounts out of fear, while many others chose to fight it.

The police said they had opened an investigation but refused to say who could be behind the app, says an IANS report

The people who made the app used fake identities, but Hasiba Amin, a social media coordinator for the opposition Congress party, blamed several accounts which regularly attack Muslims, especially Muslim women, and claim to support right-wing politics.

This is not the first time Muslim women have been targeted in this manner. On May 13, as Muslims celebrated the festival of Eid, a YouTube channel ran an "Eid Special" - a live "auction" of Muslim women from India and Pakistan.