Bengaluru student arrested in the ‘Bulli Bai’ hate app case targetting Muslim women was average in studies, had poor attendance, and kept to himself. He was in the third semester of a civil engineering course at a prominent college in Kumaraswamy Layout. He is from Bihar and is about 21.
Mumbai’s cyber police came looking for him at 11.30 am when he was attending a class on Monday. The student was called to the faculty room and his parents were informed over a call before he was whisked away. His arrest was confirmed the next day and he was sent to police custody till January 10.
He is the first among the four to be apprehended in the case where an app called Bulli Bai was hosted on GitHub (see box) to display photos of at least 100 Muslim women for a fake auction and these photos were shared on Twitter by handles with Sikh aliases. The co-accused are youngsters under 22 from Uttarakhand and Assam.
Metrolife visited the Bengaluru campus and spoke to students from his department and other courses. With the exception of two BCom students, no one knew about the controversy that has hit the national headlines, and galvanised cyber teams from Mumbai and Delhi into action.
His name did not ring a bell to most of his batchmates and seniors and none knew where the accused, a day scholar, lived. He was enrolled in Section A and the class representative said he had not noticed him more than two times in the class. The students also blame the pandemic for limited interactions among each other. After a year of virtual classes, students returned for on-campus classes on October 4, 2021. Auditoriums are shut and college events barred for Covid safety since then.
A member of the faculty says the boy had no delinquency records, but his attendance was just 60%. “We had shared the concern with his parents,” he says. The college has no plans of holding an internal inquiry for now.
What is Bulli Bai case?
On January 1, photos of over 100 Muslim women were listed on an app called Bulli Bai for a virtual auction. Photos were used without their consent, some morphed. The women are mostly journalists, social workers and student activists critical of the government, and active on social media. The app was hosted on a platform called GitHub, and shared via multiple Twitter accounts. This comes six months after an app called Sulli Deals surfaced on the same platform, putting the profiles of several Muslim women up for bidding. No arrests have been made in connection with that incident yet.
Sulli and Bulli are derogatory terms used to refer to Muslim women.
What is GitHub?
It is the world’s largest open-source software development platform. Users can upload their codes on the website for others to view, edit, or collaborate. Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals apps were developed and hosted on GitHub.
The San Francisco-based company has taken down the two offensive apps. The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), which is India’s nodal agency on cyber security, and the police are co-ordinating with GitHub to identify the creators.
Bengaluru student’s involvement
He allegedly made a Twitter handle called Khalsa Supremacist with a bio claiming that he lived in Canada. D Prajapati, his lawyer, says he has been falsely implicated.