Sena MP urges IT Minister for action against 'Sulli Deals' and 'Liberal Doge'

Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi on Friday wrote a letter to IT Minister Ashwani Vaishnaw urging him to act against social media sites and channels who have been protraying women in bad light and demeaning their dignity.

She said: "I request you to take urgent and strict actions to deal with such nuisance so as to protect the dignity of women of our society as any responsible government should."

In the letter, she said that a few months back, a YouTube channel 'Liberal Doge' ran a live "auction" of women belonging to a particular community. People were bidding and rating women based on their physical appearance and wrote degrading comments.

"More recently, pictures of several women have been uploaded without their knowledge or consent on the app called "Sulli Deals' that had posted pictures of several women from various professions, including journalists, sourced from their social media websites.

"The women targeted on the app faced threats, embarrassment, and harassment after their pictures were put up. The purpose of the app was to degrade and humiliate women belonging to a particular community," she said.

The women are horrified since the incident has left them scarred and troubled and some have since then deleted their social media accounts and many others said they were afraid of further harassment. The misuse of social and digital media to harass and attack the dignity of a woman is disheartening, she added.

She alleged though Delhi and Noida Police have registered cases, no real progress has been made so far. The lack of stringent and efficient preventive laws and punishments for such cases only motivates the perpetrators.

"It pains me to see that hardly any movement with regards to these cases has happened as of now despite the seriousness," she added.

As per reports dozens of Muslim women in India found they had been put up for sale online, on "Sulli Deals", an app and website that had taken publicly available pictures of women and created profiles, describing the women as "deals of the day".

BBC said the app's landing page had a photo of an unknown woman.

The app pretended to offer users the chance to buy a "Sulli" -- a derogatory slang term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women. There was no real auction of any kind -- the purpose of the app was just to degrade and humiliate.