For 19 days, Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent Indian activist, has been on a hunger strike in New Delhi, adding momentum to a youth-led protest demanding justice for millions of Indian students.
“Victims never raise their own voice,” said Mr. Wangchuk, who has subsisted on nothing but water mixed with salts since June 28. “This time, for a change, young people were doing that. How could I not support them?”
The protest by the Cockroach Janta Party — a movement which started out as a joke following a judge’s dismissive comment comparing India’s young to cockroaches — gathered steam after India canceled its nationwide medical college entrance exams in May because the test questions were leaked. The scandal caused widespread outrage among young people.
The C.J.P. quickly became an outlet for India’s Gen Z to vent about educational mismanagement and unemployment. In less than two months, it has grown into a movement calling for accountability and reforms to India’s intensely competitive examination system for universities and government jobs.
Mr. Wangchuk and the C.J.P. are also demanding the resignation of India’s education minister.
Why did he start the hunger strike?
Mr. Wangchuk, who has long campaigned for education reform, said in a telephone interview from the protest site on Wednesday that the C.J.P. movement resonated with the fight he started as a young man.
“I have not chosen this issue today,” Mr. Wangchuk said, speaking in a low but steady voice. “I chose this issue 40 years ago when I decided to work in the field of education.”
Images of Mr. Wangchuk have circulated widely online, showing him resting on a mattress, dressed in a beige T-shirt.
He has lost about 9 kilograms, or about 20 pounds, but doctors monitoring Mr. Wangchuk’s health say his vital signs are good, according to a statement by the C.J.P.
Numerous public figures, including the writer Arundhati Roy, have expressed solidarity
What does he expect to achieve?
Mr. Wangchuk has said that placing one’s own body at risk carries moral force when other democratic avenues have been exhausted. Asked what would persuade him to end the fast, Mr. Wangchuk said the first step would be accountability for the failures that had anguished students and even prompted some to take their own lives after the exam was canceled, according to Indian media reports. Changes to the examination system, he said, would also be necessary.
Mr. Wangchuk said his protest is meant to influence the government as well as to mobilize the public.
The Indian government has not formally responded to the C.J.P. and Mr. Wangchuk’s demand that Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, resign. Last month, Mr. Pradhan dismissed the protests in a television interview and called the C.J.P. the “B-team of disruptive elements.”
“Awakening public opinion and persuading those in power are two sides of the same coin,” Mr. Wangchuk said. “When you awaken the public, you bring change into governments. They care about public opinion. They may not care about my health.”
But by Thursday, as Mr. Wangchuk’s health continued to deteriorate, many called for him to break his fast. Instead, the activist urged people to show up at another protest planned for July 20.
How did he become an activist?
Mr. Wangchuk, 59, is a mechanical engineer by training, but he has worn multiple hats over the decades as an educator, environmentalist and activist. A native of Ladakh, a strategically important and ecologically fragile Himalayan region close to India’s border with China, Mr. Wangchuk has tried to secure better safeguards for the region’s land, jobs and environment from the Indian central government.
Ladakh was part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Indian government brought under its direct control in 2019. Mr. Wangchuk has fought for the rights of his people since then.
He has previously sat for prolonged fasts over Ladakh’s constitutional future and environmental protections. In March 2024, he said he would fast for 21 days for the cause — the longest hunger strike he has been on.
Why is education important to him?
Mr. Wangchuk’s interest in education comes from personal experience. As a child growing up in Uleytokpo, a village in western Ladakh with no formal school, his mother taught him in the Ladhaki language. He began formal schooling in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu of Kashmir, where the language of instruction was Urdu, which he did not understand. He has often said teachers mistook the language barrier for poor academic ability.
After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1987, he co-founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, an organization that tried to create an alternative school where Ladakhi students would not face similar language barriers.
It later became one of India’s best-known alternative education institutions and won Mr. Wangchuk the Ramon Magsaysay award in 2018, often called Asia’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Many Indians also know Mr. Wangchuk as the real-life inspiration for the character Phunsukh Wangdu in the hit Bollywood film “3 Idiots.”