Ladakh statehood and environment activist Sonam Wangchuk began a hunger strike along with six students at the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest site here on Sunday to demand Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation for the NEET-UG paper leak and other exam lapses.
Before beginning the strike, Wangchuk visited Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial at Rajghat with CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and others.
At the protest site on Jantar Mantar Road, Wangchuk told the gathering: “I have been forced to sit here. I am not doing this happily. I am sitting on a fast in support of both issues (protecting the Himalayas as well as Pradhan’s resignation). Many people ask me: ‘You were doing a movement in Ladakh, why are you with the CJP now?’ Education, which is the issue here, has been close to my heart for the last 40 years, since I was a student.”
He added: “I wish the government had shown sensitivity… we would not have had to go through this and sit here in such heat…. When there is no accountability, we are forced to take the only way possible in a democracy — peaceful protest, and we will do that.”
Wangchuk was on a hunger strike in September last year for 15 days in Leh to press for statehood for the Union Territory of Ladakh. He was arrested after the agitation turned violent and detained under the National Security Act in a prison in Jodhpur for six months.
The six students who joined Wangchuk are from AISA, the student arm of CPIML-Liberation.
AISA national president Neha Bora, who is also on hunger strike, told The Telegraph that it would be wrong to assume that the government was unfazed by Wangchuk’s previous hunger strike.
“In fact, he was incarcerated soon after it. I also do not believe that it is so easy to round up six students sitting on a fast unto death at the heart of Delhi. It is extremely risky, and all of our comrades, friends and family are worried about us. But what do you do when an education system claims students’ lives and the person responsible for it refuses to even acknowledge it?” she said.
“We have no choice but to make the government choose and have the entire country witness the decision the government makes and stand in the historic judgement of the government’s choice,” she said.