Bulli Bai: How Indian Muslim Women Are Being Targeted For Dissent

Bulli Bai app targetting Muslim women to silence dissent: On 1 January, in the morning of New Year, I woke up with new hopes and plans, and everything was going well like any other typical day until my WhatsApp started ringing. It was none other than my friend Afroz who sent me several images, and for me, it was no less than a nightmare when I opened the files. Those images were the screenshots containing the photos of several Muslim women. Moreover, on the top of every woman's profile, it was written, "Your Bulli Bai of the day," along with her Twitter username. Then I quickly realised that they had created another application like Sulli Deals for humiliating and dehumanising Muslim Women.

However, my profile was not in the screenshots. I opened the app to check; then, a page popped up with the morphed image of a guy and the "Get me a Bulli" option at the bottom. Every time I clicked on that button, different profiles of Muslim women appeared. I was numb and shocked when I saw my profile there, along with other women. This was the first time I was targeted in Bulli Bai, we cannot even imagine how traumatic it must be for the women who have been targeted repeatedly.

The perpetrators had posted and uploaded photographs on an app for "sale" sourced without permission from their social media accounts, and amplified with the anonymous Twitter handles along with the derogatory remarks. This time they have transgressed all the limits and targeted more than 100 vocal Muslim women of Twitter, who often raise their voices against atrocities and injustice. Surprisingly, unlike previous attacks, they have targeted women of all age groups this time, whether it is 66-year-old Hyderabad-based activist Khalida Parveen, missing JNU student Najeeb's mother Fatima Nafis, or writer Rana Safvi.

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Different name, same hatred

Here, "Bulli" is a variation of "Sulli", a derogatory term used often as slang for Muslim women. This time, the perpetrators used the Gurmukhi language in the "Bulli Bai" interface along with English to deflect the blame towards the Sikh community. The Bulli Bai app interface was similar to the one used during Sulli Deals. The app was taken down within a few minutes by GitHub, and the anonymous Twitter handles were also suspended after mass reporting of those profiles.

This, however, is not the second instance, but a fourth attempt to auction Muslim women through online platforms within one year. The first was a YouTube channel called Liberal Doge where images of Pakistani and Indian women were auctioned. The second was Sulli Deals in July 2021, when the pictures of Indian Muslim Women were uploaded, and the culprits tagged women's online profiles to the text "Your Sulli Deal of the Day". The third was in November 2021, when the culprits created private chatrooms on Clubhouse and auctioned women and nefariously discussed the women' s intimate body parts.

An attempt at erasure of discourse

The Bulli Bai app is a nightmare for all the targeted women and attempts to silence us from the public sphere. Here, perpetrators want to intimidate and eventually deter us from shaping the public discourse. Strikingly, the targeted hatred for Muslim women increased after the anti-CAA-NRC protest, and trolling is one of the easiest ways to erase the voices of Muslim women from online platforms. They aim to demotivate Muslim women who continuously raise their voices against any form of oppression and assert their identity.

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Secondly, the constant attempts like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai is a product of the patriarchal mindset where they shame and dehumanise women of a community to satisfy their male ego. Such instances of Islamophobic attitude can be figured out from Gujarat riots to the Bulli bai, where targeting of women is used as an apparatus to humiliate the entire Muslim community.

The arrest of an 18 year-old-woman as a mastermind behind the Bulli Bai controversy implies that the conflation of patriarchy and religion is radicalising the entire generation. Numerous hardliner camps and organisations run by right-wing groups are using women to instigate hatred towards other women from communities. They have constructed a narrative of "our women and their women" which is responsible for creating a feeling of antagonism. Bulli Bai is just a single instance of such instigated hatred that compelled a woman to humiliate other women.

Amidst the Bulli Bai app issue, another video is also circulating on social media where a school-going girl instigates the Hindu community and asks them to fight for the religion. Here, radicalisation, specifically of women, is becoming a significant threat to society that should be eliminated soon.

Hence, de-radicalisation of generation is the need of the hour so that incidences like Sulli deals and Bulli Bai do not happen again to traumatise the women of Muslim as well of other minority communities.

This is an external contribution. Views expressed are the author's own.