FIR Registered for Uploading Female Journalist's Doctored Photo; Govt. Demands for Immediate Action

By: WE Staff | Monday, 3 January 2022

The Delhi Police have registered a FIR against unidentified suspects for allegedly uploading a doctored photo of a female journalist to a website. The government has directed its cyber security and law enforcement agencies to investigate claims that a website had doctored photographs and abusive statements "intended to degrade Muslim women."

According to senior government sources, “the Indian Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-In), the national nodal agency for monitoring cyber security incidents and related threats, has been asked to form “a high level committee” to probe the incident, and to co-ordinate with the cyber cells of state police forces.”

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw tweeted late Saturday night that the user had been barred by GitHub, the coding site where the programme was housed, and that Cert-In and police were "co-coordinating further action."

The government was "working with police organisations in Delhi and Mumbai on this problem," Vaishnaw said on Sunday.

On Saturday, Delhi Police stated they had received a complaint from a Delhi-based journalist and were "investigating" it in order to take "necessary legal action." On Sunday, a FIR was filed at the Southeast district's cyber cell police station.

An account on Twitter has been suspended for spreading links to a GitHub-hosted programme. The offensive app's name was the same as the Twitter username. Emails seeking comment on the account and its suspension were not returned.

Another app with a name identical to the one under investigation first emerged on GitHub in June 2021, with photographs of Muslim women titled "deal of the day."

Separate FIRs against unknown people were filed by police in Noida and Delhi on July 7 and 8, but the investigations have stalled since then.

This week, doctored images of at least 100 Muslim women were released online, along with filthy remarks and comments. The information was later deleted from GitHub, but several Twitter users identified the ladies and shared images of the website.

The Delhi-based journalist accused unknown people of spreading hostility, sexual harassment, and insulting women in a police case filed on Saturday.

She said, “I was shocked to find…that a website/portal…had a doctored picture of me in an improper, unacceptable and clearly lewd context… The…content…is clearly aimed at insulting Muslim women…and the entire website seems to have been designed with the intent of embarrassing and insulting Muslim women.”

The complaint said, “this is nothing short of online harassment and the tweet referred to herein is per se liable for criminal action. ‘GitHub’ is violent, threatening and intending to create a feeling of fear and shame in my mind as well as in the minds of women in general, and the Muslim community, whose women are being targeted in this hateful manner. In fact, this website has been targeting other Muslim women as well….”

In response to the complaint, a case has been filed under IPC Sections 354A (sexual harassment), 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration), 509 (word, gesture, or act intended to insult a woman's modesty), and 153A (promoting enmity between different religious groups and doing acts prejudicial to maintaining harmony).

According to sources in the cyber unit, they had identified certain accounts associated with the controversial messages, which had been disabled following the police report.

Many of the women who were targeted in this case had also been targeted in a previous instance. The first investigation had stopped, according to a senior Delhi Police official, because GitHub had refused to participate.