by RAFIA ZAKARIA
The women who were targeted were shocked when they found out. Last week, over 80 Indian Muslim women discovered that they had been put up for ‘sale’ on a hosting platform called GitHub. The women included were educated and prominent, including a commercial pilot, research analysts and journalists. An app using a derogatory term for Muslim women was created to present the women on the platform as “S**** deal of the day”.
Under the photos of many of the women was their personal information and statements that the women could be purchased. People were bidding for the women, offering different amounts of money for them. When the women found out last week, the pictures had apparently already been up for 20 days with their information available to anyone who logged on. As one woman put it: “It doesn’t matter how strong you are, but if your photo and other personal information is made public it scares you, it bothers you.”
It was only when news of this incident began to spread and the women began to speak out, that the owners of Github finally took the platform down. The women’s information, of course, had already been publicly available to trolls who could now harass them online and offline. Some of the women went ahead and filed FIRs against the people responsible for the online degradation. The Delhi police registered the FIRs but seemed unmotivated to do anything. When one of them, an alt-right troll named Ajeet Bharti tweeted that there was nothing wrong with what GitHub had done in “making good deal available to masses” no action was taken against him at all. “These people are not sorry and they are not scared because they know nothing will happen to them,” said one of the affected women despondently. A spokesman from GitHub, the platform that had allowed these allegedly unknown trolls to post this ‘auction’ of Muslim women, said that the company was “against discrimination of any kind”.
Except discrimination, or rather vengeance against an imagined past when Muslims ruled over Hindus, is exactly what appears to be on the mind of the many Hindutva trolls that lurk online. As recent controversies over the building of temples by razing mosques, threatening movie directors for positive depiction of Muslims and various iterations of harassing Muslim women prove, a new and highly toxic definition of Hindu masculinity is under construction. This new Hindu masculinity sees real and imagined domination over Muslims, particularly Muslim women, as central to being a strong man, a Hindu man and a powerful man. Various branches of the BJP and its genealogical progenitors including the RSS are working hard to ensure that this model of masculinity dominates across the vastness of India. The BJP’s Hindutva troll army, therefore, makes it its daily business to pursue and intimidate everyone that is not under their Hindutva umbrella: Muslim women, lower caste women or people from any other group that they oppose are their choice victims.
Dawn for more