Neither has a criminal record. Both are in their 20s and tech-savvy. The two are alleged developers of two apps on GitHub that targeted Muslim women, including activists and journalists by “auctioning” them. Now, they are cell mates in a Delhi police station.
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The similarities end there.
Delhi Police officers who have questioned the two men said there is little in common between them. One wanted the world to know he developed the GitHub app Bulli Bai, even daring Mumbai police to arrest him; the other, the alleged creator of Sulli Deals (using an offensive and derogatory term for Muslim women), deleted all digital footprints and social media profiles to ensure he remained anonymous, and managed to stay so for eight months.
Neeraj Bishnoi (21) and Aumkareshwar Thakur (26) are locked up together inside a cell at the headquarters of Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion Strategic Operations (IFSO) in south west Delhi’s Dwarka. On Sunday night, when police brought Thakur to the IFSO office, after arresting him in Indore, it was the first time the two men met. Police say that for all these months, the two men hid behind anonymous Twitter handles but claim that they were part of the same virtual group where the plan to come up with such an app was discussed last year.
“Bishnoi wanted to be famous. Thakur wished to remain anonymous. Bishnoi is loud. He tries to mislead the investigators. He even attempted to hurt himself twice in custody. Thakur is cold; maybe he thinks he has managed to erase the evidence. He doesn’t speak much and blames Bishnoi for framing him,” said a police officer, who questioned the two men. Which is understandable. The first app was launched in July 2021, and if not for Bishnoi’s Bulli Bai, which was launched in December -- and if not for the investigation that followed -- Thakur may have continued to remain anonymous, and safe.
{{/usCountry}}“Bishnoi wanted to be famous. Thakur wished to remain anonymous. Bishnoi is loud. He tries to mislead the investigators. He even attempted to hurt himself twice in custody. Thakur is cold; maybe he thinks he has managed to erase the evidence. He doesn’t speak much and blames Bishnoi for framing him,” said a police officer, who questioned the two men. Which is understandable. The first app was launched in July 2021, and if not for Bishnoi’s Bulli Bai, which was launched in December -- and if not for the investigation that followed -- Thakur may have continued to remain anonymous, and safe.
{{/usCountry}}Their ideology
Investigators describe Bishnoi as “cunning” and “emotionless”, and say he has no regrets about what he did. He also talks a lot, they add.
”He (Bishnoi) says a lot of things. He says he is a communist. And then he changes his stance and claims that his thoughts lean towards the extreme right. But the evidence we have gathered suggests he has no ideology. He spends hours on the internet, and only wanted to defame women. His laptop showed he is addicted to pornography. We recovered at least 153 tabs on his browser windows that were links to adult websites,” said a police officer who asked not to be named.
The officer described Thakur as someone who deliberately chose to target Muslim women. “Thakur seems to be the more rigid between the two. He was the leader of the virtual group on Twitter when the idea to come up with an app was decided. He took the lead and developed the app. He took suggestions from the group members on the people whose photographs were to be used. He seems to have been radicalised on his own after spending hours on social media. He has not spoken to us about any specific incident or anecdote on why he started hating one particular community,” another officer said, referring to Muslims.
Thakur is a freelance web designer, who pursued his BCA from IPS Academy in Indore. Bishnoi is a second year B.Tech student (suspended after arrest) from the Vellore Institute of Technology, Bhopal. Bishnoi, originally from Jorhat in Assam, is the son of the grocer.
Thakur’s father works with a private company in Bhopal. Police have said that the two were part of Twitter a group, Tradmahasabha, where, in January 2020 , a plan to defame Muslim women was hatched.
Thakur joined the group using one of his handles @gangescion. Bishnoi, too, was in the group with one of his handles.
“Bishnoi said he knew Thakur from that group. In fact, Bishnoi used the same code from Thakur’s app to build the Bulli Deals app,” said a third police officer who asked not to be named.
One dared cops to arrest him, other deleted proof
“You have arrested the wrong person. I am the creator of #BulliBaiApp,” a tweet by handle @giyu44 boasted on January 5, a day after Mumbai police arrested three suspects in the case for allegedly sharing a tweet which promoted the second GitHub app.
In the 24 hours before he was arrested on January 5, Neeraj Bishnoi claimed repeatedly on Twitter that he was the person behind the offensive app. He even tagged handles such as that of Satej D Patil, Maharashtra’s minister of state for home (urban) and housing, on Twitter, daring the Mumbai police to arrest him.
KPS Malhotra, chief of IFSO, confirmed that Bishnoi was the owner of the @giyo44 Twitter account. DCP Malhotra said Bishnoi had in the past, created at least five Twitter handles using different versions of the name Giyo, such as @giyu2002, @giyu007, @giyuu84, @giyu94 and @guyi44 to promote the app or make derogatory comments against women. Police officers said that Bishnoi even asked his interrogators to address him as Giyo , a name from Giyu Tomioka, a fictional character who kills demons in the Japanese comic and animated series Demon Slayer.
“He did not want to be arrested so he masked his IP address and showed that he was posting the tweets from Nepal. He even claimed he was from a place near Kathmandu. He wanted people to know that he created the app but did not think we would trace his digital footprint and arrest him from his house in Assam,” the third police officer said.
Meanwhile, in Indore’s New York City Township Colony, Thakur was following the news. Delhi Police did register a case against the creators of the first app in July 2021, but the probe went nowhere.
“Thakur used his iPad and iPhone to access social media, but after the public outcry (following the first app), he logged out. He even logged out from all Twitter groups he was part of; erased his Facebook account, and accounts he had in his own name; and did not keep in touch with anyone even anonymously. We have seized his electronic devices and sent them for forensic examination,” the third police officer added.
According to this officer, Thakur first joined Twitter using his own credentials in 2013. He completed his BCA in 2018 but worked from home, taking on website design assignments. “He started calling himself a Trad around 2019. He said Trad groups on social media are for like-minded people with self-created philosophy of ensuring that the world should not change and stick to traditions.”
Two carefully lived lives
The two men spend hours on social media but were different characters in front of their family. Thakur’s father, Akhilesh Thakur, who spoke to reporters after his son’s arrest, has refused to believe the police’s allegations. He said he still believes that Thakur was arrested only because Bishnoi named him in his interrogation. “My son told me over phone that he has not done anything wrong. Some accused took his name and he is being implicated wrongly,” his father told HT. The family said Thakur was not even part of any social media group so the allegations of him developing such as app were false.
In Jorhat, Bishnoi’s family, too, is unable to come to terms with the police’s allegations. Police said they weren’t surprised that the family knows nothing about Bishnoi’s criminal side. “Bishnoi, who has an opinion on almost every topic on social media and was vociferous about it through his anonymous accounts, was a completely different person when our officers arrested him. It cannot be explained. He was so connected to his family and appeared to be a man without a single fault. Here was a man who masked his IP address, and dared the police to arrest him,” a fourth officer said.
Bishnoi’s father Dashrath has a different take on why he believes his son in innocent. The man said that his son has only one friend. They have studied together right from Class 1. “They have accused my son of hating Muslims and uploading photos. My son cannot do this. His best and only friend is a Muslim. His name is Afzal.”