THE POISONED WELL

Ask around in the Digambar Chowk area of Jorhat in Assam about engineering student Niraj Bishnoi and you run up against a strange kind of absence. Many in the neighbourhood did not even know he existed.

- Kaushik Deka

Those who know him invariably describe a shy, silent boy who shunned the social glare. Two of his teachers at the local St Mary’s School recall an average student who “did not require to be disciplined”. His shopkeeper-father Dasharatha Bishnoi says Niraj never had friends since his school days. Even in the virtual world, he was wrapped in that mask of absence: no profile exists by his name on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram....

On January 5, the 21-year-old recluse became the national face of hatred, as Delhi Police arrested him on charges of being the creator of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app that put several Muslim women—journalists, activists, even the mother of missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed—up for an online ‘auction’. Clearly inspired by the ‘Sulli Deals’ platform that surfaced last year, ‘Bulli Bai’ was developed in November and turned over to the public eye on software-sharing site GitHub on December 31. No actual sale was involved on either app: their purpose was purely to degrade and harass Muslim women. Sulli Deals had come and gone without stirring the law’s conscience, but the national outrage this time had a retrospective effect: of the five people arrested, one was its alleged mastermind. Both apps have now been deleted.