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.

Researched by: Sara Varghese and Vagda Galhotra 

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: 

• The creators scraped photos of hundreds of Muslim women from social media platforms—including journalists, activists, analysts, artists and researchers. 
• Most were Indian, but other nationalities including Pakistanis were targeted too. 
• Basically, you open the app, click ‘Find me a sulli’ and it brings up the photo of one of the women. That’s it. The straightforward aim is to sexualise and demean these Muslim women.
• Describing itself as a “community driven open source project,” the app appears to have been around for at least 20 days. The creators remain unknown—but GitHub has taken down the app, saying, “GitHub has longstanding policies against content and conduct involving harassment, discrimination, and inciting violence.”
• But no other action has been taken against the perpetrators—although some of the victims are planning to file an FIR. 
• One of the women, Saniya Ahmed, tweeted, “It is a clear case of trafficking, which is legally and morally wrong… These people are potential rapists. The inaction over this has the potential to lead to rapes.”

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:

“After sometime, he told me that if I know any Muslim girls, he’ll arrange a room for me at my workplace. He said, ‘You can get the Muslim girls, we can rape them together and will make MMS.’ He said I should promote Hindu dharma.”

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:

“Innumerable accounts like these, post graphic pornographic content where Muslim women, or ‘sex-slaves of kattar Hindu men’, are shown asking for sex with Hindu men. These men often describe themselves as ‘owners of Muslim women’ and their profiles are peppered with words like ‘uncut’ (uncircumcised) and ‘bull’. Muslim men are termed as ‘katuwas’ (a slur for circumcised men) who are supposed to be sexually inferior and ‘cannot satisfy women.’”

Also this: 

“These accounts share hundreds of pornographic videos of women in hijab every day, with inflammatory captions such as ‘Hindu tigers, f*ck us.’ There are a range of messages on these social media accounts, presenting Muslim women as objects meant to be violently raped… Photoshopped pictures of Hindu men and pregnant women in saffron hijab are also widely shared by these accounts. The content is replete with references to Hindu rashtra where kattar Hindu men will take over Muslim women and teach them a ‘lesson’.”

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:

• In 2014, then BJP MP Yogi Adityanath said: “We have decided that if they capture one Hindu girl, then we will bring back at least 100 Muslim girls… Our response will be a hundred times worse than their act.”
• In 2015, Karnataka BJP MP Tejasvi Surya tweeted: “95% Arab women have never had an orgasm in the last few hundred years! Every mother has produced kids as act of sex and not love.” 
• In 2019, after Article 370 was revoked, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar “joked” at a Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao event: “Our Minister O.P. Dhankar used to say that he will have to bring daughters-in-law from Bihar. People nowadays have started saying the route to Kashmir is cleared and now we will bring girls from Kashmir.”

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?!

Women’s bodies have always been the casualties in any kind of conflict, including war. And as Feminism In India notes, ‘converting’ Muslim women—by force or consent—has long been a trope in Hindutva thought: “[A] conversion of Muslim women to Hinduism was considered heroic. Any Hindu man who successfully wooed a Muslim woman was glorified as the possessor of ultimate masculine prowess.” 

Sexual violence as vengeance: The rhetoric aimed at Muslim women exactly mirrors the discourse around ‘love jihad’—where Hindu women are abducted or seduced by ravenous Muslim men. And sexual violence against Muslim women is justified by it—an argument neatly laid out but none other than Veer Sarvarkar, a revered Hindutva icon. As Ajaz Ashraf notes in Scroll, Sarvarkar took kings like Shivaji to task for refusing to rape or convert Muslim women to punish them for the sins of their men: 

“Suppose if from the earliest Muslim invasions of India, the Hindus also, whenever they were victors on the battlefields, had decided to pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin or punished them in some other ways, i.e., by conversion even with force, and then absorbed them in their fold, then? Then with this horrible apprehension at their heart they would have desisted from their evil designs against any Hindu lady…

 

If they had taken such a fright in the first two or three centuries, millions and millions of luckless Hindu ladies would have been saved all their indignities, loss of their own religion, rapes, ravages and other unimaginable persecutions.”

Translation: We should have raped their women first. 

The Hindutva male: In Economic & Political Weekly, Sujatha Subramanian points to an “anxious masculinity” that lies at the heart of right-wing Hindu nationalism. It requires that women—especially Muslim women—know their place. And any who speak out or challenge the Hindutva project or its icons are to be put in their place:

“In their social media use, proponents of Hindutva display… a desire to maintain the status quo of gender relations as dictated within their ideology. The presence of women in online spaces and their participation in political debates is seen as a challenge to the status quo, since within the Hindutva ideology women are expected to identify with the private sphere of the home, with their roles being limited to those of mother, wife and daughter. This anxiety then takes the form of policing the presence of women in the public sphere and threatening them with violence.”

A masculinity already threatened by stereotypes of a “virile” and “dangerous” Muslim male cannot tolerate being challenged by a Muslim woman. 

Big irony alert: Elsewhere in the world, Muslim women are targeted precisely for the opposite reason: for seeming ‘submissive’ or ‘traditional’ just because they wear a hijab or head scarf. Multiple studies across Europe and the UK show that they are more likely to be abused or attacked when dressed in traditional attire:

“In the Netherlands, 90 percent of victims reporting incidents of violence to Meld Islamofobie (Report Islamophobia) in 2015 were Muslim women; in France, the Collective Against Islamophobia reported that 81 percent of violent incidents involved Muslim women, as did more than half of incidents reported to Tell MAMA, an NGO in Britain. In each study, women who wore visible symbols of Islam such as a hijab or niqab were more likely to be targeted.”

It is their punishment for being visibly Muslim. A UK researcher went “undercover” and wore a hijab, jilbab or niqab, and here’s what she found:

“Logging her experiences of pretending to be a Muslim woman over the course of a month, Zempi spoke of the daily abuse she faced dressed as a Muslim woman, saying that if she pretended to be Muslim for another month, she would have most likely faced being attacked physically. She also spoke about an instance when a ‘white skinhead’ had begun showing her "knife gestures" making her ‘afraid for her life… The experience was so bad that I couldn't sleep or eat for weeks,’ said Zempi. ‘It took me many months before I could get over this experience’.”

The bottomline: Do we need one?

Reading list

If you read only one story on this list, make it Article 14’s investigation into online sexual violence aimed at Muslim women. NewsLaundry dug up a lot of details on Ritesh Jha aka Liberal Doge. Feminism In India looks at the history of the stereotypes surrounding the Hindu and Muslim males. EPW looks at the construction of Hindutva masculinity and the Internet Hindu. Ajaz Ashraf in Scroll does a brilliant job of deconstructing Veer Sarvarkar’s justification of the rape of Muslim women. Washington Post looks at how Muslim women are targeted in the West for looking too Muslim. Also a good read: This Hindustan Times op-ed on the rise of a new kind of Indian Muslim woman.