WEB DESK
Shaheen Bagh ki Dadi, the 82-year-old Bilkis, who sat in protest from 8am to midnight against Controversial Citizenship Amendment Act CAA is among TIME 100 most influential people of 2020.
Time is an influential American weekly news magazine and news website published and based in New York City. First published in New York City on March 3, 1923 and for many years it was run by its influential co-founder Henry Luce
Bilkis became the voice of the marginalized in India, who used to sit sit at a protest site from 8 a.m. to midnight.
She had been sitting there ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government passed the Controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which is seen as discriminatory against Muslims. Dadi continued through the cold winter.
Bilkis, along with thousands of women who joined her in Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in New Delhi, became the symbol of resistance in a nation where the voices of women and minorities were being systematically drowned out by the majoritarian politics of the Modi regime.
Bilkis gave hope and strength to activists and student leaders who were being thrown behind bars for standing up for the unpopular truth in a democracy that was sliding into authoritarianism, and inspired peaceful copycat protests across the country.