Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad listed in TIME’s 100 emerging leaders

Bhim Army chief Chandra Shekhar Azad and five Indian-origin personalities are part of TIME magazine’s annual list of 100 “emerging leaders who are shaping the future”.

Azad’s entry on the list mentions Bhim Army’s movement to help Dalits escape poverty through education along with the activist-party’s ‘distinct brand of assertiveness’ and its campaign for justice. The section also refers to Aazad’s foray into politics. Thirty-four-year-old Azad is the leader of the Bhim Army which runs schools to help Dalits escape poverty through education. He is also known as ‘Ravan’, a name he has given to himself.

The 2021 TIME100 Next, released on Wednesday, is an expansion of TIME’s flagship TIME100 franchise of the most influential people in the world and highlights 100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future.

Other Indian-origin personalities on the list are Instacart founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta, doctor and Executive Director of nonprofit Get Us PPE Shikha Gupta and founder of nonprofit Upsolve Rohan Pavuluri.

Azad, 34, is the leader of the Bhim Army, which runs schools to help Dalits escape poverty through education and also “practices a distinct brand of assertiveness, sweeping into villages on loud motorbikes to protect victims of caste-based violence and organising provocative demonstrations against discrimination,” the TIME profile on him says. “By challenging the notion that Dalits should be deferential, says Dhrubo Jyoti, a Dalit journalist at the Hindustan Times, Aazad and the Bhim Army “have visually and psychologically changed the pitch of caste resistance in India,” the profile says.

Aazad and the Bhim army also “spearheaded a campaign for justice” in the case of the fatal gang-rape of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras.