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Mangaluru: On the evening of July 22, a Mumbai police van carrying detained protesters came to a halt in front of a lone young woman standing her ground, arms outstretched, refusing to budge. By the next morning, the video of that moment had travelled far beyond Shivaji Park, and so had her name.

Rhiya Yadav, 27, would like to be known as a “citizen of this country first”, and only then as an actor, a psychology graduate, and now a student of English literature at Bombay University. 

The July 22 protest was not her first. She had shown up the previous evening too, when police vans were being loaded with detained protesters, and she’d stood her ground until they were released.

“I stood there until they were all freed,” she says. The difference this time was that the van was already moving and she was the one standing in its path.

“I took the onus on myself,” she says of the moment, still sounding faintly surprised by her own instinct.

‘I was resolved to let the police even drive over me’

“You can definitely not scare me away. I was resolved to let the police even drive over me.” The adrenaline rush that she felt after her indomitable act of stopping a police van kept her up till 5:30 am next morning. “In my head, I kept replaying what had happened.”

Her social media, true to her generation, is usually filled with videos of grooming, modelling, dance and travel. The past few days, it has taken on a different shape entirely – she laughs at the mention of the “GRWM for Protest” videos she recently put up. GRWM stands for ‘Get Ready With Me’, a popular social media video format where someone films themselves getting ready (makeup, outfit, routine) while talking to the camera.

Born and raised in Bombay, Rhiya is the youngest of three sisters and has a nine-year-old brother, the youngest of all. Her parents grew up in villages near Agra before moving to Mumbai, and she credits that journey from a small, close knit rural community to the churn of Bombay for shaping their openness. 

Contrary to many young people at the protest, who have been sharing stories of them having to hide their participation in the ongoing protests from their parents, Rhiya says her parents have been supportive of her activism, and her choice of life.

Rhiya........

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