Female Muslim Activists Become Targets Of Online Harassment

Afreen Fatima leading a student protest. Photo by Thoufeeq K.

NEW DELHI — Afreen Fatima, a Muslim student activist, was already used to online harassment, but she was still shocked to discover her photos from social media were posted in a fake online auction advertising her body as the “deal of the day.”

“There was a sudden numbness, and I didn’t know how to react,” she told ReligionUnplugged.com.

Fatima was one of dozens of Muslim women in India this summer who found they had been put up for sale online on the app called “Sulli Deals,” hosted by the U.S.-based platform GitHub. “Sulli” is a derogatory term for Muslim women in India used primarily by anti-Muslim Hindu nationalists.  

The Sulli Deals incident in July was not an isolated cyber attack, Muslim women activists say, but part of a larger online ecosystem of sexual fetishization and degradation of Muslim women in India. 

For example, during Eid-al-Fitr celebrations in May, Hindu nationalist YouTube channels such as Liberal Doge, Liberal Doge Live and Keshu X streamed stolen pictures of Pakistani women with the caption, “Quench your lust with your eyes.” There are also everyday cases of online bullying that Muslim women face, which they say is primarily because of the anti-majoritarian views that they share on social media.

“I used to ignore all the online harassment earlier, but you can’t unsee it all,” Fatima said. “You cannot unsee when a person sends you a pornographic image.”

Online abuse may have risen after anti-citizenship law protests

Safoora Zargar, a Muslim activist and student at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, attracted media attention as a leader in the Shaheen Bagh protests against India’s new citizenship laws that fast-track citizenship for certain immigrants — but not Muslims. A riot near the protest site in February 2020 killed more than 40 people and injured more than 200, mostly Muslims.

READ: India Sees Worst Violence In Decades As Mob Attacks Muslim Protesters

Police arrested Zargar, claiming she incited violence by protesting. She was three months pregnant at the time. A Hindu nationalist campaign claimed Zargar wasn’t married and became pregnant during the months of sit-in protests. The extent of the online abuse became so intense that Zargar said her friends released photographs of her marriage on social media to counter such claims.  

She said she believes that the campaign targeting Muslim women — rather than just men — intensified after the Shaheen Bagh movement as the right-wing Hindu-first network began to feel that Muslim women were a larger threat in the fight against patriarchy and Islamophobia.

“When a woman stands in a nonviolent way and questions you, your narrative that you're out there to save the Muslim woman crumbles to dust,” she told ReligionUnplugged.com. “When I come out to bust your hate-filled stereotypes, your propaganda crumbles. This is when they realized that Muslim women are a bigger threat to communalism and patriarchy in general.”

For example, India’s current Bharatiya Janata Party campaigned on issues such as abolishing triple talaq, an Islamic marriage practice that allowed Muslim men to divorce their wives instantly. Critics say the party’s position was meant to give the appearance of protecting Muslim women but in reality was discriminatory because it applied only to Muslims while allowing Hindu men to leave their wives without legal consequence.

READ: Why India Is Trying To Criminalize Instant Divorce For Muslim Men

Yumna Ahmad, a freelance journalist based in Delhi, began receiving hate-filled and misogynistic private messages on social media after she reported a story for Maktoob Media on the lynching of a Muslim man in June.

Ahmad is not politically active online, and she said the incident made her think that there is no scope for any argument online since she was targeted simply because of her Muslim identity. It has also impacted her mentally and socially. She expressed apprehensions about doing similar political stories in the future. 

Hana Mohsin Khan. Photo courtesy of Khan.

“It does affect a lot when you get to know how much intolerance there is and most of it comes because of what my name is,” Ahmad told ReligionUnplugged.com.

Hana Mohsin Khan, a commercial pilot who similarly does not tweet about politics, found her name and photo from her Twitter profile on the Sulli Deals app.

“Had I had another name, my name would probably not have been on that app,” she told ReligionUnplugged.com.

Khan said she feels that such targeting of Muslim women has forced many to stop using their real names on Twitter on account of the “rampant exoticization and sexualization.”

“Such women also face censorship back home, and when an incident like this happens, people around them say, ‘See, we told you so,’” Khan said.

Legal interventions

India’s penal code does not define bullying or punish it as a crime, but some of its provisions and other laws can be used to fight online harassers, including India’s Information Technology Act and sections of the penal code added by the National Commission for Women that specifically define cyber stalking and cyber bullying against women.

The victims of such online harassment have criticized the police response and wonder if it would be different if those harassed belonged to a different community. More than a month after the Sulli Deals incident, no arrests have been made.  

Yash Giri, an advocate at India’s supreme court, said he believes that any platform or website has an ethical and legal responsibility to put a stop to harassment or hate speech that takes place on their platforms.

However, he also said he thinks that such complaints against online harassment coming from a certain community affect the police investigation.

“The investigation does not take place properly as a Muslim name is involved,” he said. “Had a political figure been targeted or harassed, the whole police department would have been on the roll.”

Anas Tanwir, also a lawyer at the supreme court, said he believes that the dismal police response to cyber bullying is due in part to many in the police sharing an anti-Muslim or Hindu-first ideology with the perpetrators, which encourages them to look the other way.

“There is a complete lack of impunity among such people,” Tanwir said. “They are the spine of the Hindu right-wing troll army. They view all this as a sense of entitlement over Muslim women.”

Despite several members of the Indian Parliament writing to Home Minister Amit Shah, the investigation into the perpetrators behind the Sulli Deals app seems to have ground to a halt as GitHub, the U.S.-based platform has reportedly not shared details about its users needed to track down suspects. After about a month after the auction photos appeared on the app, GitHub suspended the users who posted them.

“We suspended user accounts following the investigation of reports of such activity, all of which violate our policies,” a GitHub spokesperson told Al Jazeera.

Zargar said she believes that it’s important to recognize that real people are behind online harassment of women, not anonymous trolls.

“The people who mock us aren’t merely trolls, they are common people who could be among us, and if we invisibilize them, we'll never know who they are,” Zargar said. “That’s why it becomes more important to counter them.”

Rishabh Jain is an independent journalist based in Delhi. Follow him at @ThisIsRjain.

Fateh Veer Singh Guram is a Delhi-based freelance journalist whose work covers issues ranging from human rights, caste and communalism. His work has appeared in CNN, Al Jazeera, Vice News and Channel News Asia, among others. Follow him at @GuramBhaaji.