Sonam Wangchuk Says CJP Protest Is Apolitical, Urges PM Modi to Show Sensitivity

Strip the news text out of the picture altogether, and this is a scene about a man voluntarily disappearing in public, trying to reach the conscience of a country.

This is what it looks like at the human level:

The Jantar Mantar Scene

Think of Jantar Mantar in the July heat. It is noisy and busy and chaotic. But on a small stage sits a 59-year-old man, Sonam Wangchuk, who should be in the quiet mountains of Ladakh. He has been lying, instead, on a white, thin mattress, for over two weeks, totally deprived of food.

His cheekbones are tight under his skin. His weight has gone down more than 8kg. He has grown too physically weak to speak, but visitors say he gestures silently to people who come up to the stage. As the police argue over the tarpaulin sheet to shield him from the sun, and national television cameras look the other way, his body quietly eats itself.

A Struggle for Other People’s Children

Why is he doing this? The most deeply human element. Wangchuk does not have a child whose exams were ruined. He is starving his own body because he cannot stomach the quiet despair of millions of young students and their parents.

He looks at a huge national crisis, where exam papers are leaked and sold like groceries, and he sees the human wreckage. He thought of the families who had saved for years to pay for cram schools and then had their children's futures stolen. He considers the thick, suffocating silence in the homes of young people who have taken their own lives, driven to the edge by total despair.

When he says, "What kind of doctor would you get if the exam paper were out?" he's not delivering a political speech. He asks a protective, grandfatherly question about the basics of survival. He is asking us what happens to our humanity when we teach our children that honesty is a weakness and the only way to get ahead is to cheat.

The Wall of Silence

A reporter asks him if the government has contacted him after starving for 16 days. He quietly says, "No".

That “No” is a heavy,