A Mumbai court has discharged Vishal Sudhirkumar Jha in the Bulli Bai app case, holding that merely following the controversial application or maintaining contact with other accused persons cannot, by itself, make someone criminally liable.
The order was passed by Bandra judicial magistrate RT Ingle on October 6, marking the first discharge in the case involving the online display of photographs of more than 100 Muslim women for a purported auction.
The court found no material in the charge-sheet showing that Jha had any direct role in creating the Bulli Bai application or assisting others in developing it.
The magistrate noted that Jha may have followed the application because of his familiarity with some of the co-accused, but there was no evidence of any further participation that could connect him to the alleged offences.
The court also referred to an Allahabad High Court ruling concerning the act of merely following a page on a website, observing that such conduct, without more, does not constitute a criminal offence.
The Bulli Bai controversy centred on an application hosted through GitHub that featured photographs of Muslim women without their consent and presented them as part of a purported online auction.
Jha, along with two other accused, had earlier been granted bail. The court had at that stage observed that the older accused persons had allegedly taken advantage of their immaturity.
Jha faced charges under Sections 153(a), 153(b) and 295(a) of the Indian Penal Code, along with Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, relating to the alleged publication or transmission of obscene material in electronic form.
His counsel, Marmik Shah, argued that the prosecution’s own charge-sheet did not attribute any substantive act to Jha beyond allegedly following the application. It was also argued that investigators had failed to produce evidence supporting the allegation that Jha had shared the application on his Twitter account.
The court accepted the defence submissions and discharged Jha from all the charges.
Additional Public Prosecutor Kalpana Hire represented the State.