More than two weeks have passed since Sonam Wangchuk began his indefinite hunger strike at Delhi's Jantar Mantar. The engineer, education reformer, and climate activist joined a student-led movement demanding accountability for alleged examination irregularities, including the NEET paper leak, and has called for greater transparency in India's education system. As concerns about his health grow and public support for the protest continues, Wangchuk has become the latest figure in a long line of Indians who have turned to one of the country's most enduring forms of political dissent: the hunger strike.

In India, hunger strikes are acts of resistance that seek to compel those in power to listen. Their power lies in their simplicity. When other avenues of communication appear exhausted, the protester's own body becomes a site of protest.

Long before Wangchuk, figures such as Anna Hazare, Irom Sharmila and G.D. Agarwal, used fasting to draw attention to causes they believed could not be ignored. And before them all stood Mahatma Gandhi, who transformed fasting into one of the defining political languages of India's freedom struggle. Together, their stories trace a parallel history of India, told through citizens willing to stake their bodies on their convictions.

A decade and a half before Wangchuk's fast, another protest captured the nation's attention. In 2011, Anna Hazare sat on a fast at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan demanding the passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill, an anti-corruption ombudsman. Millions followed the movement. For many young Indians, it was their first experience of mass civic mobilisation. The protest demonstrated that even in an age of television news and social media, the image of a fasting individual could still galvanise a nation.

Before Hazare, there was Irom Sharmila, whose hunger strike remains one of the longest in modern history. Beginning in 2000 after the Malom massacre in Manipur, Sharmila fasted for sixteen years demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). Force-fed through a nasal tube for most of that period, she transformed the hunger strike from a short-term political tactic into an extraordinary act of endurance. Her protest highlighted how the peripheries of India often have to fight that much harder to be heard by the political centre.

Environmental activist G.D. Agarwal, also known as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand, used the same method in his campaign to protect the Ganga. A former environmental engineer and professor, Agarwal repeatedly fasted to demand stronger protections for the river. In 2018, after more than 100 days of fasting, he passed away. His death reignited debates about environmental governance and the extent to which governments listen to ecological concerns only when they become crises.

And then there was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who transformed fasting into a defining language of Indian political action. During the freedom struggle, Gandhi used fasts to protest against British policies and social injustices within Indian society itself. For Gandhi, fasting was a moral act; an appeal to the conscience of both oppressor and oppressed. His fasts became inseparable from the story of India's independence movement.

Seen together, these hunger strikes form an alternative history of India. They tell the story not of governments and legislation alone, but of citizens demanding to be heard. From independence to anti-corruption campaigns, fasting has become a tool of collective struggle when people feel conventional channels of communication have failed them.

Not every hunger strike succeeds — some end in compromise, some in tragedy, and some fade from public memory. But their significance lies beyond immediate outcomes. They remind us that democracy survives through constant negotiation between citizens and the state.

Protest, whether through marches, petitions, sit-ins, or hunger strikes, is one of the mechanisms through which that negotiation occurs. It is how people challenge power, draw attention to overlooked issues, and demand accountability from those who govern them. Democracies they remain healthy because citizens retain the ability to question them. The history of hunger strikes in India is ultimately a history of that right; the right to dissent and to demand better, and finally to insist that those in power do the bare minimum and listen.

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