When Sonam Wangchuk Starved, India Looked Away!!!
Biswanath Bhattacharya
July 16, 2026
Things are looking grimmer by the day. At Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk’s body is no longer merely resisting hunger; it is being forced to carry the full, unbearable weight of a nation’s cowardice. Seventeen days into an indefinite fast, reports say he has lost more than eight kilograms, begun losing muscle mass, and is enduring severe pain. But the most frightening thing is not that his body is weakening. The most frightening thing is that India can still function normally while it happens.
Here is a man who could have lived comfortably inside the applause he had already earned. A Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, an engineer, an education reformer, an environmental innovator, a man whose work on ice stupas and alternative learning carried India’s name with dignity before the world — he did not choose ease. He chose the difficult road again and again. He chose Ladakh’s fragile mountains. He chose children betrayed by broken systems. He chose the unheard. Today, he is choosing to put his own life in danger because those in power appear unwilling even to listen.
What does it say about us that a son of India must starve himself to be heard by his own government? What does it say about our democracy if a citizen has to turn his body into a warning bell before power even pretends to listen? What does it say about our conscience if a man of such integrity can tremble on a protest site while the country scrolls, shrugs, argues, excuses, and moves on as though a slow public death is just another item in the news cycle?
This is not my idea of India. This is not the India we were promised. This is not the India that taught itself to respect sacrifice, truth, non-violence, and moral courage. Somewhere along the way, we stopped feeling. We began to treat suffering as background noise. We learned to accept silence where there should have been outrage, indifference where there should have been compassion, and official arrogance where there should have been dialogue.
Sonam Wangchuk is not fasting for vanity. He is not performing pain for spectacle. He is not begging for privilege, office, or reward. His protest speaks to a deeper wound: the collapse of accountability in education, the anguish of students and families, the demand for justice, and the long struggle for Ladakh’s dignity, constitutional safeguards, statehood, and environmental protection. His weakening body is now a mirror held up to the Republic — and the reflection is not merely brutal. It is shameful.
The mountain is crying, and the nation is not listening. The glaciers he tried to protect are watching. The children he tried to empower are watching. The students whose futures have been crushed by leaks, corruption, and institutional rot are watching. Ladakh, which has given India borders, soldiers, silence, and sacrifice, is watching. And still, power behaves as though a human life can be processed like paperwork, postponed like a file, and ignored until the body breaks.
There is something obscene about a country that celebrates its heroes only when they can be garlanded, quoted, photographed, and used as symbols — but abandons them the moment they become inconvenient as voices. We invoke Gandhi, but recoil before satyagraha. We praise sacrifice, but panic when sacrifice points a finger at power. We call ourselves citizens, but too often behave like spectators in a moral disaster, waiting for someone else to speak, someone else to act, someone else to risk something.
I have no words left, except the words we owe him like a debt. I am sorry, sir. We are failing you. We are failing you by allowing the nation to reach a point where a man of your stature must gamble with his own life just to make the powerful listen. We are failing you because we normalised cruelty dressed as governance, indifference dressed as maturity, and silence dressed as patience. We are failing you because we forgot that democracy without compassion is not democracy at all. It is only machinery without a soul.
This is no longer only a question for the Central Government. It is an indictment of every one of us. If we cannot stand with a man who has spent his life standing for children, mountains, communities, and the future, what does our solidarity mean? If we cannot feel urgency when his pulse weakens, what does our citizenship stand for? If we cannot rise when conscience itself is starving in public view, then perhaps we must admit the ugliest truth: we were never as brave, as humane, or as democratic as we claimed to be.
Sonam Wangchuk has chosen a tragically wrong party to confront: the Bharatiya Janata Party, a ruling formation that appears to have shed moral standing so completely that conscience itself seems to bounce off its walls. This is a party that speaks the language of nationhood while ignoring a son of the nation, claims strength while appearing afraid of a fasting man, and invokes service while reducing governance to command, denial, optics, and control. When a government can watch a public servant of such stature weaken in full view and still respond with distance, delay, and political calculation, it is not merely failing a protester; it is exposing the hollowness at the centre of its power.
July 20 must not become another date on which India hesitated, looked away, and then pretended not to remember. It must become the day we understood that silence is not neutrality; silence is complicity. One day of fasting in solidarity, one day of collective conscience, one day of refusing to look away may not save everything — but it may save us from the final disgrace of watching a good man disappear while we measured our inconvenience, protected our comfort, and called our fear prudence.
Sonam Wangchuk is fighting for Ladakh. He is fighting for students. He is fighting for accountability. He is fighting for the future. Today, he is also fighting for his life. And if India cannot answer even this, then the shame will not belong to him. It will belong to us — to every institution that looked away, every leader who stayed silent, every citizen who waited for courage to become convenient, and every voice that discovered caution precisely when conscience demanded a scream.
If we cannot stand up now, history will not ask what Sonam Wangchuk did for India. It will ask what India did when Sonam Wangchuk needed her. And if the answer is silence, delay, cowardice, and comfortable excuses, then no slogan, no flag, no speech, no ceremony, no anthem, and no carefully staged performance of patriotism will be able to wash away that stain. History will not be gentle with a nation that let one of its finest sons beg for justice with his own body while power waited for exhaustion to do what argument could not.
(Tripurainfo)
more articles...