INDIA ON HER MIND

From an award-winning documentary filmmaker capturing India’s diversity, to an elected official keeping her city clean, Yasmin Kidwai is the quintessential patriot

- Aekta Kapoor

On the day that the Delhi police raided the Nizamuddin Markaz mosque to evacuate over 1,500 members of the Tablighi Jamaat religious congregation for defying India’s nationwide lockdown, Yasmin Kidwai happened to be close by, getting the neighbourhood of Nizammudin West sanitised with her team of municipal workers. As an elected councillor of the municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD), the area falls under her constituency, and with coronavirus in town, it was an essential service that the mother of two could not avoid even if it came at a risk.

Yasmin was aware that hundreds of Indians and foreigners were stuck inside the mosque’s residential quarters. “I don’t know them nor identify with their beliefs, but I do know that they are religious travellers. The Indian government had no business letting them into India in the first place with the threat of a pandemic. And if you knew they were inside, why the delay in evacuating them? And after evacuating them, why allow them to travel all over India?” asks the Hindu College alumnus, shaking her head with disbelief. “It was completely mismanaged.”