Author – Linisha Agarwal
What the Wangchuk Hunger Strike Is Really Asking For
Day Eighteen and Counting
Sonam Wangchuk has been on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi since June 28, 2026. As of mid-July, he is more than two weeks into the fast.
The strike is a protest demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the repeated failures of India’s national entrance examination system—most recently the 2026 NEET-UG paper leaks, which forced the National Testing Agency to cancel and reschedule the exam, disrupting the plans of millions of students. (The fast is held in solidarity with the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party, which first raised the resignation demand.)
The Real Phunsukh Wangdu (No Script Required)
Long before this hunger strike made headlines, Wangchuk had already spent nearly four decades working on real, measurable problems in one of India’s most neglected regions. No Bollywood screenplay needed, though one did borrow rather liberally from his life.
In 1988, fresh out of engineering college, he co-founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) to help Ladakhi students who were failing the government exam system at the time; roughly 95% of them did. Through SECMOL and the subsequent Operation New Hope, a joint effort with the government and village communities, he helped rewrite localized textbooks, retrain teachers, and rebuild village ownership of schools. The results were not symbolic: the pass percentage in Ladakh’s schools rose from around 5% to roughly 75%.
In 2014, facing a worsening water crisis driven by climate change, he invented the ice stupa, an artificial glacier that stores winter stream water as towering cones of ice and releases it in spring when farmers need it most. It is, in effect, a savings account for water, run without a single banker involved. The innovation has since been studied and replicated in other cold, mountainous regions of the world. He later founded the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), to extend the same practical, locally rooted philosophy to higher education. During the 2020 India-China border tensions, he also designed a solar-heated tent to help Indian soldiers stationed in the harsh cold of the Galwan Valley.
This body of work has earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2018, often called Asia’s Nobel Prize) and the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2016), both international honors. Yet domestic recognition has not followed in kind: in September 2025, Wangchuk was detained under the National Security Act amid protests over Ladakh’s statehood demands. Supporters point to this contrast. Decades of internationally recognized on-the-ground work for ordinary Ladakhi students and farmers, met at home with detention rather than honor, is part of why his current fast carries so much weight with the public.
The Minister and the Paper Trail
Dharmendra Pradhan has served as Union Minister of Education since July 2021. Before that, he held cabinet portfolios in Petroleum and Natural Gas, Steel, and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. He represents Sambalpur, Odisha, in the Lok Sabha as a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This is not the first NEET-UG crisis under his tenure. In 2024, the ministry faced scrutiny after allegations of large-scale malpractice in that year’s exam; the Supreme Court reviewed the matter and found no evidence of systemic fraud, though isolated incidents led to more than 100 arrests. In 2026, controversy resurfaced when the NTA cancelled the May 3 exam over fresh paper-leak allegations and rescheduled it for June 21.
Two leaks in three years is less a pattern and more a subscription service. Critics argue that a second major breakdown within two years points to an unresolved structural weakness in exam administration rather than a one-off failure, which is the central premise of the resignation demand.
Skin in the Game (Just Not Theirs)
Supporters of the protest make a straightforward argument: the officials who administer and defend India’s public exam and education system have, in practice, opted their own children out of it.
This is not unique to Pradhan. A review of India’s cabinet-rank ministers found that of 21 children of ministers for whom information was available, 15 had a foreign degree or were currently studying abroad. Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar has publicly described Indian students going abroad as a “new disease,” warning that it costs the country a “$6 billion forex and brain “drain” while his own daughter completed an MBA at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. It is, at minimum, an unusual diagnosis to make about a disease one’s own household appears to have caught.
The critique that follows from this pattern is this: if the children of the people setting exam policy depended on NEET, on NTA’s competence, and on Indian public institutions the way millions of ordinary families’ children do, the incentive to fix recurring failures, leaks, delays, and administrative breakdowns would likely be far stronger. It is easy to call a system resilient when your own child was never going to sit in it. Policy made at a comfortable distance from its own consequences, the argument goes, is less urgent to fix.
Framed this way, the demand is not about discrediting a person or a party. It is about the basic democratic principle that those who set the rules should be answerable to the people who live under them and, ideally, should have some skin in the game.
Patriotism Isn’t a Loyalty Card
A recurring objection to protests like this one is that they are unpatriotic or divisive. Wangchuk explicitly rejects that framing. His argument rests on a distinction that is foundational to democratic accountability: the government is meant to serve the nation, not the reverse. Criticizing a government’s performance, demanding a resignation over specific, documented failures, is not the same as opposing the country itself. No punch card gets stamped for staying quiet.
On this view, “holding an elected minister accountable for repeated institutional failure is a civic act, not a hostile one.” Silence or acquiescence in the face of repeated harm to millions of students would be the more troubling outcome for a functioning democracy.
The Bottom Line
The Wangchuk hunger strike sits at the intersection of a genuine policy failure, two major NEET-UG crises in three years, and a broader, structural critique of a political class whose own children are largely insulated from the systems they administer. Whether or not one agrees that resignation is the right remedy, the underlying accountability argument does not depend on party affiliation: it rests on the simple claim that those who govern a system should be answerable for its failures and that citizens holding them to that standard is a democratic act, not an unpatriotic one.
