On 6 October 2026, Judicial Magistrate First Class R. T. Ingle of the 12th Court at Bandra discharged Vishal Sudhirkumar Jha, the first accused to be discharged in the Bulli Bai app case. MediaNama reports that the court found the prosecution had not established that Jha shared the app on Twitter, helped create it, or supplied photographs of Muslim women to its alleged creator. Proceedings against the other accused continue.
The case for a hard line
The strongest argument against reading this order generously deserves a fair statement. Bulli Bai was not an abstract speech controversy. The app appeared on GitHub on 1 January 2022 and displayed photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, including journalists and activists, for a purported online "auction". No auction took place, but the women were targeted with harassment after their photographs appeared without consent. It followed the Sulli Deals app of July 2021. Harassment campaigns like this work through crowds: a creator builds the tool, and followers amplify it. A prosecutor might say that treating each amplifier as peripheral lets a coordinated campaign escape accountability. That concern is serious, and the victims' harm is not diminished by this order.
What the court actually decided
The order is narrower than a headline might suggest. The magistrate did not hold that the app was lawful or that the harassment was acceptable. The court held that the evidence against Jha did not show participation. According to MediaNama, the investigating officer present at the hearing could not show that Jha shared the app. The court noted that the app was removed soon after launch and that no record showed Jha sharing it. It also held that Jha's contact with a co-accused did not, by itself, establish involvement. The court relied on an Allahabad High Court judgment holding that following a page is not an offence under the IT Act.
Jha had been charged under IPC Sections 153(a), 153(b), 295(a), 354(d), 509, 500, 120(b) and 201 read with Section 34, plus Section 67 of the IT Act. Section 67 punishes whoever "publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted" obscene material in electronic form, with up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of up to five lakh rupees on a first conviction, according to a reproduction of the statute. The operative verbs are publishing and transmitting. Following an account does neither.
Why this matters for speech
A follow is a weak signal. People follow accounts to monitor them, report on them, mock them, or because a platform recommended them. Journalists and researchers who track harassment networks routinely follow the very accounts they cover. If following were sufficient for criminal charges, the same logic would reach reporters, trust-and-safety staff and the victims' own supporters. A rule that criminalises association instead of conduct chills exactly the scrutiny that exposes abuse.
The order is consistent with the logic of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, decided on 24 March 2015, in which the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A as violating Article 19(1)(a) because vague, expansive offences chill lawful speech. The same judgment read down the intermediary safe harbour in Section 79(3)(b), so that, per a LiveLaw summary, a platform loses protection only on actual knowledge through a court order or government notification. Both holdings share a principle: liability should attach to identifiable acts and to specific, authorised notice, not to proximity or to broad suspicion.
Where the real accountability lies
The discharge does not leave the case without a path to accountability. The prosecution's theory against the creators rests on conduct: building the app, supplying photographs, publishing. The Bulli Bai creator, Niraj Bishnoi, and the Sulli Deals creator, Aumkareshwar Thakur, were granted bail by a Delhi court on 28 March 2022. The News Minute reported that police cited pending Forensic Science Laboratory results and replies from intermediaries. That detail points to the evidence a prosecution should be built on: platform records, forensic data and traceable acts. Intermediaries have a proportionate role here as well, responding to lawful court orders and valid requests for data, which is the framework Shreya Singhal preserved.
The pro-innovation, pro-speech position is not indifference to harassment. It is insistence that the state prove what each defendant did. Pushing prosecutors to evidence of authorship and distribution also tends to produce stronger convictions, because those are the cases that survive appeal. Overbroad charging produces the opposite: delayed trials, discharges years later and a message that the system cannot tell organisers from onlookers.
What to watch
This is a magistrate's order on one accused, not a precedent binding other courts. Three questions follow. Will the prosecution challenge the discharge? Will the remaining accused seek discharge on similar grounds, and will courts distinguish them based on evidence of sharing or creation? And will investigators in future harassment-app cases collect platform data early enough to prove conduct while it still exists? Courts that insist on proof of acts, and investigators who gather it quickly, protect victims and open-internet norms at the same time.