FOR scores of Muslim women in India, the new year once again brought home the bone-chilling realisation that they are not safe even within the four walls of their homes. On Jan 1, six months after a similar episode took place in July, more than 100 of them discovered they had been put up for ‘sale’ at a fake online auction, with their pictures and personal details uploaded on a purpose-built app. As on the previous occasion, the targeted women included rights activists, journalists and other professionals. Among them was prominent actress Shabana Azmi, a sexagenarian mother of a missing Indian student and even Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. The Foreign Office on Tuesday condemned the incident, describing it as “despicable and totally unacceptable harassment and insult of Muslim women” while urging the international community to ensure the safety and security of religious minorities being persecuted by a de facto rule of Hindu extremists. The app has since been taken down by California-based platform GitHub (just as it shut down the app for Muslim women’s auction last July) and the Mumbai police have arrested three suspects.

Both incidents are evidence of increasing “communal trolling” of Muslim women by proponents of Hindutva: neither the virtual nor the physical space is safe for minorities in India. Such tactics are part of the Sangh Parivar’s broader campaign of demonising Muslims, to which the Modi-led government has given tacit approval by its persistent and perhaps strategic silence. Indeed, the purveyors of hate have become so emboldened by the state’s hands-off stance that Hindu extremists a few weeks ago openly called for the genocide of Muslims in India, invoking the ‘Rohingya model’ for their followers at the Dharma Sansad held in Haridwar, a town merely 150km away from the capital from where not a single expression of censure was issued. The ‘online auction’ is even more disturbing in a way because it highlights yet again the toxic confluence of misogyny and Islamophobia that further feeds into the Hindu machismo of today’s India. However, this mindset is not only limited to Hindutva trolls but has deep roots in the BJP-led government as well. Consider that after the scrapping of Article 370 that granted special status to India-occupied Kashmir, a BJP legislator remarked that this was an invitation for Hindus to marry “fair” Kashmiri women. The ‘auction’ is an uglier manifestation of the same triumphalist mentality.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2022