On January 1, 2022, Quratulain Rehbar, a journalist from Indian-administered Kashmir, woke up to a different reality. She was among a list of 102 women published on an online site called “Bulli Bai”, a pejorative term along with “Sulli” for Muslim women in India with hypersexual and misogynistic connotations. The site claimed to host “auctions” of the women as “deals of the day”.
It wasn’t real, but the site’s objective was clear: to degrade and humiliate the women, with impunity. The women – mostly outspoken journalists and human rights defenders – had one thing in common; they were all Muslim, and vocal about human rights violations under the current government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Raqib Hameed Naik, the founder of a nonpartisan think tank called the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) says that Islamophobic gendered hate incidents like the “Bulli Bai” and “Sulli Deals” cases are a part of an overall Islamophobic environment and disinformation that is freely allowed on tech platforms and is meant to benefit the far-right movement.
“There are two steps to this political discourse: One is the demonisation of Muslim men by presenting them as hypersexual beings who are big threats to Hindu women. The solution to this, then, is to target Muslim women [as a revenge]. The second is the direct targeting of visible Muslim women who have agency, speak their minds and defend rights of other Muslims,” Naik said.
The hate, Naik added, doesn’t stay online. “It has real-world implications.”
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