FPJ legal: Bandra court dismisses bail pleas of three Bulli Bai App case accused

A magistrate in Bandra on Thursday rejected the bail pleas of three youngsters arrested by the Cyber Police, Mumbai early this month in the Bulli Bai hate app case.

The three - Vishal Jha, 21, Shweta Singh, 19 and Mayank Rawat, 21 had taken the common ground while seeking bail that they are young and were not creators of the hate app. Rawat’s advocate Sandeep Sherkhane had argued that he is a topper scoring 99 percent and had blamed Neeraj Bishnoi for misleading and using the youngsters like Rawat. Bishnoi was then in custody of the Delhi police in an FIR registered by it regarding the hate app. The advocate called Bishnoi the app’s creator who knew in and out of its functioning.

Jha’s advocate Shivam Deshmukh had also pointed out that the only allegation against the engineering student was that he had shared the link to the hate app using a twitter handle. The woman accused Shweta Singh had alluded to her being a Dalit, a woman and also a orphan, while seeking bail.

Early this month, women of a particular community were ‘auctioned’ in the hate app 'Bulli Bai' that was hosted on the Github platform. Their photos were taken from their social media accounts and posted on the app for the ‘auction’. While Jha and Rawat are both engineering students, Singh - the woman accused in the case, is a college dropout. The police allege the youngsters operated several twitter and other social media accounts and shared the link of the app to promote it.

The police had opposed grant of bail to the trio and told the court in its response filed before it, that the three could be involved in Sulli Deals, a similar app that ‘auctioned’ women of the same community last year. It had also argued that all the three are tech-savvy and could tamper with evidence if released on bail. A detailed order is yet to be made available.