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Wednesday, July 7 2021 Dive In |
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That’s the grandfather of Sirisha Bandla who is poised to become the second India-born woman in space—after Kalpana Chawla, who died in the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2003. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams is an Indian-origin American. Bandla will be a member of the Virgin Galactic Crew along with founder Richard Branson on July 11. Watch the Reuters report and interview here. |
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A great hatred of Muslim women |
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The TLDR: An app “selling” Muslim women as “deals of the day” is the latest instance of a rising tide of assaults—both offline and online—aimed at them. We look at how and why Muslim women have become the most common targets of Islamophobia.
First, tell me about this app…The app called ‘Sulli Deals’ was created on the hosting platform called GitHub. ‘Sulli’ is an ugly pejorative used to describe Muslim women. Here’s how the app works:
Trigger warning: This section includes language that is sexually violent.
Wait, hasn’t this happened before?Yup, there have been at least two recent instances on other online platforms.
One: Just before Eid in May, a number of Twitter handles with names like DesiSulliDeals and Sullideals101 shared photos of well-known Muslim women such as Congress leader Hasiba Amin or journalist Sania Ahmad—and “sell” them in an online auction. At the time Amin said, “These people are placing bids to own me and this handle claims that I have been sold to someone. He says ‘enjoy brother’.” And Twitter finally suspended the accounts, but has done little else to crack down on this kind of behaviour—even though it is a clear violation of its content policies. There has been no legal action either even though such hate-mongering violates sections of the Information Technology Act and other laws for crimes against women and spreading communal hatred.
Two: Right after Eid, a Hindutva YouTube channel named Liberal Doge posted photos of women dressed for the occasion. The channel’s 87,000 followers were then asked to “rate” and “auction” the women to each other. After great social media outrage, the channel was taken down, as was its Twitter handle—both of which are owned by a 23-year-old Gurgaon resident named Ritesh Jha. When a person (who happens to be a Hindu male) filed a complaint against Jha on Facebook, he reached out to the complainant on DM:
So describing these people as “potential rapists” may be exactly right.
Big point to note: These ‘Sulli deals’ kind of incidents are mild compared to the many fake social media accounts that pretend to be submissive Muslim women or virile Hindu men—and are very much active, as an Article 14 investigation notes:
Also this:
Not just internet trolls: The hateful rhetoric may be more straightforward on these kinds of handles, but similar sentiments have been freely shared by politicians:
Data point to note: An Amnesty investigation of online abuse in India found that Muslim women politicians receive 94.1% more ethnic or religious slurs than women from other religions.
This is just sickening… but why?! |
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