Shaheen Bagh 'dadi' Bilkis on TIME's Most Influential People of 2020

New Delhi: Braving one of Delhi's harshest winters, a few women started a movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) at Shaheen Bagh, including 82-year-old Bilkis, who sat for the protest every day since the beginning to fight for her rights. Soon after, hundreds joined her and other women who accompanied her, later known as the "dadis of Shaheen Bagh".

While the protest no longer exists, it became a symbol of hope and resistance not just in India but worldwide.

Now, TIME magazine has included Bilkis in its list of "The 100 Most Influential People of 2020."

Speaking to Millennium Post, Asma, one of the dadis who protested alongside Bilkis, said: "We sat to speak against the CAA and NRC. We did what was right. Shaheen Bagh was a movement against the wrong and the whole country saw it. I am an Indian and I am as much a part of Hindustan as anyone else."

On her thoughts of Bilkis featuring on TIME, Asma said speaking for what is wrong is necessary and she wants Prime Minister Narendra Modi to hear that as well.

Journalist and author Rana Ayyub, has penned the piece for TIME magazine, where she says, "Bilkis became the voice of the marginalised… 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."

Poet-writer Hussain Haidry posted on Twitter: "A Muslim woman who chose to stand up against a tyrannical regime in her old age, ended up being in the same international list as the leader of the tyrannical regime. 'Sab yaad rakkha jaayega' means this for me: the history of the hunt will not just be written by the hunter."