Nikhat Zareen and team
A Dalit man from Telangana state has created history. Who would have thought? A middle-class girl, conservative family, the third of four sisters – Nikhat Zareen was not impressed by all this. She reached for the stars and took the sky as her own.
25-year-old Zareen started boxing at the age of 13 and is a flyweight boxer. It was like this was what she was made for, and after starting her career, she hasn’t looked back. In 2010, he won a gold medal at the State Championships in Karimnagar.
He won gold at the 2011 World Junior and Youth Championships. In 2014, Nikhat received an amount of Rs. Telangana Chief Minister K. 50 lakh as cash incentive from Chandrashekhar Rao.
Earlier this year, Zareen became the first Indian to win two gold medals at the Strandja Memorial. She won bronze during the 2019 Asian Championship. She and Mary Kom were in the news in 2019 for all the wrong reasons.
‘Who is Nikhat Zareen?’ Who can forget this statement of Mary Kom.
What happened?
The selection trials for the 2019 World Championships were cancelled, and an automatic selection was given to Mary Kom. Not satisfied with what happened, Nikhat wrote a letter to the Boxing Federation of India.
The then BFI president Rajesh Bhandari said the decision was taken keeping in mind India’s best condition to win the medal. When told that Kom would be an automatic choice for the Tokyo Olympics, Zareen called for a fair chance. Then Mary Kom said, “Who is Nikhat Zareen?,
It was then that she wrote to the sports ministry, stating that Olympic gold medalists would also have to fight to qualify and represent the country. Trials are conducted, Mary Kom takes on Nikhat Zareen, and eventually defeats him.
Who would have thought? A middle-class girl, conservative family, the third of four sisters – Nikhat Zareen was not subdued by all this and much more. She reached for the stars and took the sky as her own.