Delhi police have arrested a 20-year-old engineering student from Jorhat district in Assam in the Bulli Bai app case, opening another flank at a time the police in Opposition-ruled Maharashtra have already caught three other suspects.
Niraj Bishnoi, a student of Vellore Institute of Technology in Bhopal, was at home in Jorhat as classes have shifted online owing to the pandemic when he was picked up by a three-member Delhi police team on Wednesday night.
The Bulli Bai app had listed hundreds of Muslim women for a mock auction and used their social media pictures illegally.
Jorhat superintendent of police Ankur Jain told The Telegraph in response to a question that Delhi police “told us that he is the main creator of the app”.
Niraj’s father Dasrath Bishnoi, who runs a ration shop in Jorhat town, said he was confident about his son’s innocence. “My son told the police team that he was not involved with the Bulli app…. He used to be always busy with his laptop because of his online classes. I am confident about my son’s innocence.”
In Delhi, K.P.S. Malhotra, deputy commissioner of police of the intelligence fusion and strategic operations unit that made the arrest, said: “He (Niraj) is the mastermind and the person who had created this application on GitHub. He has confessed to creating the application… forensic remnants of the creation have been found in his laptop. He has been brought to Delhi.”
Delhi police said Niraj was Bulli Bai’s main Twitter account holder.
Earlier, Mumbai police sources had described Shweta Singh from Uttarakhand as the main accused but Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale had not named anyone as the mastermind.
Senior advocate Vrinda Grover explained that terms like “mastermind” did not have evidentiary value as such and were usually used by the police to attract attention to a case. “At this stage, each police department can continue their investigation…. A person cannot be prosecuted for the same offence more than once,” Grover told The Telegraph.
One of the victims told this paper: “As of now, we are given to understand that parallel probes will take place, and that different departments are cooperating with each other. We are sure Mumbai police will investigate honestly. If we find any lacunae in any of the other probes, the complainants can move court to transfer their respective FIRs to Mumbai.”
V.N. Rai, former director of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy, said cases connected with each other could be probed simultaneously by different agencies. “The accused may be the same but the events (each page concerning a woman) are different…,” Rai said.
The Jamia Teachers Association called for strict action by the police and for “all sane voices to vociferously oppose such acts”. It said in a statement: “This is the second time in a year that such a deplorable act has been done, perhaps because no action has yet been taken against the perpetrators of the earlier app, Sulli Deals…. The worrisome part is that this online aggression may soon turn into physical violence and attacks against women.”
Without mentioning the Bulli Bai case, several IIM-Ahmedabad and Bangalore students and faculty said in an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “Your silence on the rising intolerance in our country, Honourable Prime Minister, is disheartening to all of us who value the multicultural fabric of our country. Your silence, Honourable Prime Minister, emboldens the hate-filled voices and threatens the unity and integrity of our country. We request you, Honourable Prime Minister, to stand firm against forces that seek to divide us. We ask your leadership to turn our minds and hearts, as a nation, away from inciting hatred against our people.”
The Press Club of India on Thursday tweeted: “The Press Club of India (PCI) condemns the abhorrent act of the public auctioning of Muslim women’s modesty through the Bulli Bai app. It is a deep-rooted conspiracy hatched by a larger group of misogynists aided and abetted by political forces for fomenting hatred against a community.”
Additional reporting by PTI
