New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday, August 12, refused to order a stay on the investigation into the ‘Sulli Deals’ case, in which multiple first information reports (FIRs) have been lodged against the app’s creator, Aumkareshwar Thakur.
‘Sulli Deals’ is an app that first surfaced in July, 2021, on content sharing platform GitHub. In the app, ‘auctions’ were staged for prominent Muslim women, described using the derogatory term ‘sulli’, using manipulated photographs of these women along with derogatory descriptions.
In the present case, the top court was hearing a plea by Thakur seeking the clubbing of the many FIRs filed by numerous women in the case.
However, the bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.M. Sundresh observed that since there were multiple uploads on the platform, the FIRs were filed by multiple different aggrieved women and thus asked how the FIRs could be clubbed together.
Hundreds of women were targetted through the app, with their pictures being doctored and shared without their consent.
Also read: ‘Bulli Bai’, ‘Sulli Deals’: On Being Put Up for ‘Auction’ as an Indian Muslim Woman
While the bench issued notice to the states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, it refused the petitioner’s request to stay investigation in the FIRs.
“Only notice now. We have our doubts,” Live Law quoted the bench as saying.
While making the observations, the bench also mentioned the ‘Bulli Bai’ app, an almost identical ‘auction’ platform which came to light in January this year.
While FIRs were registered in the ‘Sulli Deals’ case when it was making headlines in July last year, no arrests in the case had been made until after ‘Bulli Bai’ surfaced and sparked outrage across the country.
In fact, ‘Bulli Bai’ creator Neeraj Bishnoi was arrested on January 6 this year, three days before Thakur, creator of the ‘Sulli Deals’ app was arrested on January 9.
Thakur and Bishnoi were both granted bail by the Patiala House court in Delhi in March this year in the case of sexual harassment filed by the Delhi Police. However, they were not free to leave custody since they faced charges in Mumbai as well, in which bail was denied to them.
Also read: As Bulli Bai Creators Get Bail, The Risks of Normalising Violence Against Women
Thereafter, in June, Thakur, Bishnoi and one more person accused in the case were granted bail by a sessions court in Mumbai, after which three others in the case were, too, granted bail, meaning that all six individuals accused in the case have been out on bail since,
