S
onam Wangchuk lost more than 11 kilograms in 26 days. By the time he finally ate something at Medanta Hospital in Gurugram on Thursday night, he was too weak to say much beyond thanking the people around him and even that, he fumbled through. He turned to his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, who'd barely left his bedside through the whole ordeal, and told her he didn't just want to say thank you. He wanted her to know what she'd meant to him.
That's the scene, more or less, as Wangchuk described it himself on X a short while later: Union Ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh in the room, senior leaders from the Apex Body of Leh Ladakh alongside them, and him, finally, breaking a fast he'd started on June 28.
Wangchuk was careful about how he framed the decision. It came, he said, after a long negotiation over specific conditions and partly out of worry that things outside the hospital were about to get worse.
Delhi Police had suspended mobile internet within a 1.5-kilometre radius of Jantar Mantar that same day, extending the blackout through midnight. Sixty-five MPs from across the political spectrum had either shown up in person or signed letters asking him to stop. Even Prime Minister Modi posted his own message, telling Wangchuk to follow his doctors' orders and get his weight back.
What did the government actually give him? Three things, according to a statement his team put out shortly after: a promise that Parliament would take up the question of accountability in India's exam system, compensation for the families of students who died by suicide after the paper leak, and no criminal cases against anyone who'd protested peacefully. His team's line summing it up "end of hunger, beginning of accountability" is doing a lot of work, and it's fair to wonder whether it'll hold up once the cameras move on.
None of this started with Wangchuk, worth remembering. Back in May, a communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke set up something called the Cockroach Janta Party, more satire than political outfit at first the kind of thing that gets a laugh online and fades in a week. It didn't fade. Student groups, the Students Federation of India among them, latched on, and by early June the whole thing had planted itself at Jantar Mantar with one demand running through it: Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan needed to go, over a leaked NEET paper and a mess with CBSE's on-screen marking that nobody in government seemed able to explain cleanly.
Pradhan hasn't resigned. He's barely budged, publicly at one point reportedly writing off the protesters in language most ministers wouldn't touch. Wangchuk showed up at the camp on June 28 and started his fast alongside six students. A few days in, plainclothes police allegedly dragged him into an ambulance and off the site, which if the goal was to quiet things down did roughly the opposite.
Even Salman Khan weighed in at one point, telling Wangchuk online that he'd send him food from home if he wanted it. That's the kind of detail that tells you how far this thing traveled beyond Jantar Mantar.
Abhijeet Dipke said he was relieved Wangchuk had broken his fast. He also said, more or less immediately, that the broader protest isn't going anywhere until Pradhan actually resigns not until there's a debate scheduled, not until there's a written assurance, until he's gone. Wangchuk, for his part, used his own statement to appeal to the students still out there: stay peaceful, he said, because there are people looking for an excuse to turn this violent.
So Parliament now has a debate to hold, families are waiting on compensation that hasn't arrived yet, and a minister who's shown no interest in resigning is still in his job. Wangchuk is off the fast. Whether that changes anything for the people still sitting at Jantar Mantar is a separate question, and right now nobody involved seems to have a confident answer to it.
