Bilkis, 82, one of the acclaimed faces of the Shaheen Bagh protest against the Centre’s new citizenship regime, was on Tuesday prevented by police from addressing the protesting farmers at the Delhi-Haryana border.

Bilkis, known as Bilkis Dadi and hailed by Time magazine as among the 100 most influential people in the world and included by the BBC in its list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world in 2020, told reporters before she was taken away: “They (the farmers) have come to help us and I am going to talk to them. Their demands are ours too. I am also a daughter and daughter-in-law of a farmer.”

Bilkis’s late husband was a fruit grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur district.

Bilkis, one of the elderly women who came to be called the “Dabang Dadis” of Shaheen Bagh, had on Tuesday afternoon gone to the Singhu border in north Delhi to meet the farmers protesting the Centre’s three new farm laws and demanding a legal provision ensuring minimum support price.

A short while after she entered the protest site with a few associates, Delhi police escorted her out in a cop vehicle.

Members of different factions of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in Punjab had come to Shaheen Bagh with food supplies and set up a community kitchen there before the police cleared the protest site on March 24.

The same outfits are part of the protests by the farmers at the Singhu and Tikri crossings between Delhi and Haryana, as well as the sit-in at the Nirankari Samagam Ground in north Delhi’s Burari.

The Rakesh Tikait-led group of the BKU is protesting at the Uttar Pradesh border in Ghazipur.

DCP (Outer North) Gaurav Sharma told The Telegraph that Bilkis had not been detained, nor had any other legal action been taken against her.

“She is not at all belonging to the cadre who are doing this protest right now. Yesterday also it was reported to me that some outside people tried to intervene in their protest and they were not welcome and some manhandling was also done. Being a senior citizen and as you know the Covid pandemic is on the rise, in good faith and for her own well-being she was requested that she should leave. As a senior citizen she was escorted back,” Sharma said.

Bilkis was taken home via Shaheen Bagh police station.