Sulli Deals

~ the obit ~

Sulli Deals was not a marketplace. Nothing was for sale and no money changed hands. It was a web page that displayed a photograph of a named Indian Muslim woman, pulled from her own public Twitter account, under the words deal of the day, and it did that for more than ninety women. The auction format was the insult. The function was the directory.

The women on it were not picked at random. Most were journalists or activists with a public record of criticizing Hindu nationalism, and putting them in one place with their names and faces attached is what the page was built to do. One of them described waking up to find her name on a list on GitHub. Another described the thing as being one tap away from finding the girl who was your deal, which is the clearest account of its purpose that anybody gave.

It was hosted on GitHub as a public repository with a live page attached, which means the harassment tool and its source code sat on the same developer platform most of the world's software passes through. One report puts it online for at least twenty days before anyone outside its intended audience found it. Circulation started on Sunday 4 July 2021, and GitHub suspended the account and pulled the page on Monday the fifth.

This story is not mine at any point and i want to be exact about the distance. In 2021 i was thirty seven and working in Ankara, reading about it in English several days late. The politics are Indian, the language of the abuse is Indian, and the word in the name is a slur for Muslim women that i had to look up. What i can speak to is the mechanism, because the mechanism is not regional at all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the clone ~

Six months later it happened again with the same code. On 1 January 2022 an app called Bulli Bai went up on GitHub doing the identical thing to hundreds of Muslim women, among them the journalist Ismat Ara and the activist Khalida Parveen. Police said the Sulli Deals code had been reused for it. GitHub removed that one too, after the backlash rather than before it.

The finding that came out of the second incident is the one worth recording. GitHub does not review what is uploaded, it reacts to reports, so a page like this stays up exactly as long as it takes for one of its targets to find it and complain. Researchers noted afterwards that neither takedown came with any account of how the thing had been allowed to sit there, and that GitHub would not hand what it knew to Indian investigators without a treaty request.

~ the court file ~

Delhi Police registered a first information report on 8 July 2021 and took most of a year to move it anywhere. Aumkareshwar Thakur, twenty five, a computer applications graduate from Indore in Madhya Pradesh, was arrested in January 2022, with the sources splitting between the eighth and the ninth. The charge sheet went to the Patiala House court in New Delhi on 4 March 2022 under the sections covering promotion of enmity between groups and sexual harassment, along with the information technology act. It says he intended to defame women of the Muslim community. He was granted bail on 29 March 2022 as a first time offender.

As far as the public record shows, neither case had produced a conviction. The page came down inside a day and the file is still open five years later, which is the ordinary arithmetic here. The listing was the permanent part, because a name and a face that have been put on a target list once stay on it.

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