Indian police claimed to have arrested the 18-year-old female mastermind behind an app responsible for posting at least 100 notable Muslim women without their consent on an app for ‘fake auction’, reported India Today. However, a man in Nepal on Wednesday claims to be the true mastermind behind the crime leading people to wonder who is right.
According to an India Today report, the woman the police believe to be behind the controversy, Shweta Singh, used a fake Twitter handle @JattKhalsa07 to upload hate posts and objectionable photos and comments online.
Singh is said to have lost her parents to Covid and cancer. She was preparing for engineering entrance examinations; she has an elder sister who is a commerce graduate, while her younger sister and brother are school students.
Meanwhile, a Twitter user reportedly from Nepal, claimed on Wednesday to be the real creator and mastermind behind the Bulli Bai app, which was hosted on web platform GitHub, and said the people arrested by the police were innocent.
The recently created Twitter id @giyu44 slammed the arrest of three people in the case and said the police should stop targeting 'innocent' youth or there will be Bulli Bai 2.0, reported The Hindustan Times.
"You have arrested the wrong person, slumbai police. I am the creator of #BulliBaiApp. Got nothing to do with the two innocents whom u arrested, release them asap," the user tweeted.
The Twitter user offered to share the real username, password and source code which were used to create the Bulli Bai app and also published an archive link.
In another tweet, the user said: “When this fiasco started I wasn’t even aware of what it might entail, so I use my friends accounts. Both Vishal and that Swati girl, I use their accounts.. They didn’t even know what I was going to do. Now they got arrested coz of me... Feel free to abuse me in comments."
In a subsequent tweet, the user said, "I will personally surrender if someone arranges for my travel by flight."
Mumbai Police officers were trying to trace the owner of the Twitter handle @giyu44 to verify his claims.
In another twist of events, according to a report in The Times of India there may be a link between the two people being called masterminds.
Shweta’s sister Manesha Singh said her sister became close to Giyu – the man from Nepal - on a social media website. His original name is Himanshu Goyal. He cheated on her and used her credentials to upload all these images on the internet.
News about the fake auction of 100 Indian women has rocked India and made international headlines.
However, news about Shweta and the tragedies she has had to face has also garnered a lot of sympathy on Twitter with many people writing in her defense.
One was Indian lyricist Javed Akhtar, who has 4.7 million followers on Twitter. “If Bully Bai was really masterminded by an 18 year old girl who has recently lost her parents to cancer n Corona I think the women or some of them meet her and like kind elders make her understand that why what ever she did was wrong . Show her compassion and forgive her,” he tweeted.
A Delhi based journalist Rohini Singh tweeted: "This [the Bulli Bai app] is clearly not random hate but a well thought out and planned attack on Indian citizens."
However, an Indian professor Ashok Swain raised a question on the issue. He tweeted: “In the Nirbhaya case, they were asking a juvenile to be treated as an adult, in Bulli Bai App, they are asking an adult to be treated as a juvenile! Why?”
Another social media user questioned why a criminal should be defended in the name of "Epidemicity victim Sympathy?"
Another user tweeted if "such" kind of “kids” were being produced in the society then “it has failed”.
So far the Indian police have arrested four accused in the case: 21-year-old Mayank Rawal was nabbed from Uttarakhand in the early hours of Wednesday, while 21-year-old engineering student Vishal Kumar Jha was held from Bengaluru on Monday.
The creator of the Bulli Bai app, 21-year-old Neeraj Bishnoi, has also been arrested by the Delhi Police from Assam, according to an India Today report.
Bishnoi is a second year B.Tech student from the Vellore Institute of Technology in Bhopal. The police have also seized a device from his home on which the app was created.
This was not the first attempt in India to target minority women. In July last year, an app and website Sulli Deals created at least 80 profiles of Muslim women and described them as "deals of the day".
Sulli is a derogatory Hindi slang term right-wing Hindu trolls use for Muslim women, and bulli is also pejorative, according to the media reports.
