(ARAB NEWS) BANGALORE, India: Last month, 80 Muslim Indian women – activists, journalists, and researchers vocal on Twitter – found their profile pictures and identities doxxed on GitHub, an open-source app. In the hate crime, meant to defame and intimidate the minority group, the targeted women were “auctioned” as the “Sulli Deal of the Day.”
Sulli is a derogatory term used by right-wing Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) groups for Muslim women.
GitHub has since suspended the account, called Sulli Deals, but the event garnered national and international press coverage. One of the first places where victims came together was on Muslim Spaces, a discussion forum hosted on Twitter Spaces.
Twitter Spaces is an audio feature that allows real-time discussions. Twitter users with a following of more than 600 people can host a Space, and anyone following them can join by clicking on a purple bubble that will appear at the top of their home feed. Participants can co-host the Space, request the mic to share their view or simply listen to the discussion.
Founded by five pro-community people (who requested anonymity), Muslim Spaces offers India’s Muslims a platform to discuss topical issues. Since its inception in May, Muslim Spaces has hosted a range of discussions – from Bollywood’s role in spreading an anti-Muslim narrative and rising hate crimes against Muslims in India to Q&A sessions on specialized topics with Islamic scholars.
The team hosts a Space every day from 10:30 p.m. onward, with discussions sometimes going on for six hours.
Muslims make up 15 percent of India’s population, the largest minority group in the nation. Since coming to power in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been pushing a Hindutva agenda in what analysts believe has led to a heighted anti-Muslim sentiment.
Aasif Mujtaba, a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi said that last year’s nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act were indicative of the lack of Muslim voices. He and several activists noticed that their concerns about the marginalization of Muslims were drowned out by media houses who claimed the movement as “anti-national.”
