Gandhi to Wangchuk, what history says about the success of hunger strikes in India

On Thursday night, educator and environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk ended the hunger strike he had started more than three weeks ago in Delhi. He is well-known for peaceful protests, some of them fasts, demanding statehood for Ladakh and drawing attention to the ecological fragility of the Himalaya.

This time, though, the issue was different.

In May, the question paper for the NEET-UG, the national entrance exam for medical school, leaked. In June, more than two million students were made to redo the exam – one of the largest examination frauds in recent memory.

Wangchuk began fasting in solidarity with members of the Cockroach Janata Party, a youth movement only weeks old but already nationally known. They were demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, accountability for the leak and an overhaul of the entrance examination system itself.

India did not invent going hungry in protest, but it has clearly made the method its own. One could even fashion an alternative history of the Republic based on its major fasts – not just of marginal protests but some of the most significant confrontations between the Indian state and people.

Even the most basic of lists is long: Sant Fateh Singh, whose refusals of food in the 1960s helped carve a Punjabi-speaking state out of undivided Punjab; Sunderlal Bahuguna’s fasts, from the Chipko years of the 1970s to his 45- and 74-day fasts against the Tehri Dam in the 1990s; Medha Patkar’s fasts against the Narmada dams; Irom Sharmila’s 16 years on a feeding tube against Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act; Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption fast of 2011; GD Agarwal’s 111-day fast to save the Ganga in 2018.

Perhaps no protest proved more consequential in independent India than that of the Gandhian Potti Sriramulu, who in 1952 began a fast unto death in what was then Madras State, demanding a separate Andhra. He died on the 58th day, but his death set in motion the redrawing of the Indian map as we know it, along largely linguistic lines.

Despite this long history, the current strike has evoked much commentary about hunger strikes being an anachronism. Surely, sceptics say, a modern democracy offers better ways? Public amnesia and cynicism is not universal, but it is widespread enough to reconsider the history, the logic and popularity of fasts.

Arguably not just India’s but the world’s most famous fasting agitationist was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). Even today, Gandhi is the method’s emblem. Early in the protests, supporters were calling Wangchuk a “modern Gandhi” and the government’s representatives vehemently opposed the comparison.

Gandhi’s belief that hunger could be an instrument of moral suasion evolved over time. It was bound up with his ideas about personal faith and diet, and began not in India but in South Africa where he spent two decades of his life from 1893 to 1914. From there, Gandhi’s fasts grew in widening, albeit interconnected, circles: first a discipline of the body, then a lever within his own household, then politics, and only later, in India, as national agitation.

In India, the first public test of the method came in 1918, and the target was not yet the colonial state but a friend. Gandhi fasted for three days in support of some 10,000 Ahmedabad mill workers demanding higher wages. The employers they were striking against were led by Gandhi’s own financial supporter and fellow Gujarati, the industrialist Ambalal Sarabhai.

The 25-day workers’ strike and the fast ended in compromise: the workers had wanted a 50% raise against the millowners’ offer of 20; Gandhi encouraged them to settle at 35.

The first of Gandhi’s landmark national fasts came a year later in 1919. This marked the beginning of what was also his first major nationwide call for a strike against the British empire. The provocation was the Rowlatt legislation, passed into law in March 1919, months after the First World War ended.

The Rowlatt Act allowed the government to detain people without trial and to try “seditious” cases without a jury. It also curtailed already limited press freedoms. For Indians, including Gandhi, who had supported Britain’s war efforts, these extensions of wartime controls on civil liberties were a grave betrayal.

Gandhi announced April 6, 1919, as a day of hartal – a suspension of work – and a national day of prayer and fasting. The response was spectacular: hundreds of thousands gathered in public locations across the country.

What made it particularly striking was that the day was largely choreographed through symbolic action rather than leaders’ speeches – a 24-hour nationwide fast; shops and markets closed; mourning emblems (black flags in Bombay, crêpe armbands in Allahabad); multifaith gatherings everywhere. This combination of symbolism and mass mobilisation inaugurated the template of Gandhian protests.

Looking back at Gandhian fasting and protests, more generally, there is a pattern that is easy to miss today. They required meticulous planning and organisation. Every fast and movement he launched had clear demands, included systematic public fund raising, and announced guidelines for participation. The authorities were always informed beforehand – Gandhi often wrote to the British Viceroy directly – and the press was kept in the loop.

Non-violence was always an essential condition. Even in the Rowlatt Satyagraha, the first of his major protests involving masses across India, these elements were present. While the main action was scheduled for April 6, Gandhi travelled across the country in February to connect with local Congress leaders.

Funding came from wealthy sympathisers and leaflets instructed people precisely how to observe the day, defining the fast as an act of “penance and purification”. Even the date was announced in advance, on March 28, giving the nation a week to prepare.

Not all Gandhi’s fasts were appeals to British power. Most, like the one in support of the Ahmedabad millworkers, were aimed at other constituencies. Gandhi fasted most often for Hindu-Muslim unity. These were among his longest fasts, and they addressed the Indian public, not the Raj.

In 1924, he fasted for 21 days in Delhi after communal violence at Kohat in the Northwest Frontier Province. At the end of his life came the fasts against the Partition killings: Calcutta in September 1947, where the violence ceased within days, and Delhi in January 1948, weeks before his assassination. Each time, order was restored. But the rift had spread beyond the reach of any fast, even Gandhi’s.

This brings us to the most important reason to think about Gandhi’s fasts in the current moment. Judged by their stated goals, they almost never succeeded, certainly not wholly. The Ahmedabad fast ended in a compromise on the textile workers’ wages. Even the Salt March of 1930, the defining image of the freedom struggle, did not lead to the abolition of the salt tax. Doesn’t this history prove exactly what today’s cynics are saying?

The answer is a self-evident no. Judging the fasts by their outcomes matters less than the context that surrounded them. From around 1916, the Gandhian freedom struggle ascended to being the main opposition to British rule in two short decades. He organised a party with millions of members, gathered a diverse following of very competent leaders around him, defeated other contenders in many small and big colonial era elections, and earned the right to be the party for the handover of power when the British left.

One need not be a Gandhian to accept the bald facts of this achievement.

Gandhi organised his way to being the movement’s central figure and at its heart was a clear vision of the choreography of mass protests. In this struggle, the success of Gandhi’s fasts can be measured not by how they changed British minds – they rarely did – but in broadcasting the issues to the Indian public, as well as where Gandhi and the Congress stood on them.

What about the coercive nature of fasts? The Gandhian argument would be that it was the weapon of the powerless against the powerful, meant to appeal to a “sleeping conscience” when all other methods fail. However, not every fast survives this bar or the judgment of history. Not even all of Gandhi’s.

When he fasted in Yeravda jail in 1932 against the separate electorates that the British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had awarded the Depressed Classes, the Dalit leader BR Ambedkar saw it as exactly that – coercion. The fast, he understood, was directed not at the British but at him; and if Gandhi died, it was Dalits across India who would face reprisal.

Ambedkar had no real choice but to negotiate. The result was a compromise: joint electorates with reserved seats. The history of that settlement is complex. But the critique does not depend on it: the fast bore down on a community with far less power than the Congress that stood behind Gandhi.

Fasts, then, can compel as much as they can persuade. However, a history of fasts shows that they have often accomplished something essential in the Indian public sphere: raising public consciousness against official or popular apathy. The method works by appealing to the audience (family, neighborhood, nation), not so much the authority who is the protest’s direct target.

And this is where the doubt cast on Wangchuk’s fast misses the mark. After all, what was ultimately salient about Gandhi’s protests was not that the powers that be refused to bow to him, it was that the people protested.

Many of his hunger strikes did not achieve their stated demands. Nor did many of his other iconic campaigns, the Salt Satyagraha and the Quit India movement among them, extract from the British what was actually demanded. But the Raj’s repeated dismissal of just demands, peacefully made, ultimately corroded the legitimacy of the colonial edifice.

After Wangchuk began his fast, supporters converged in the thousands at the protest site in Delhi, gathering in cities across the country, and registering their solidarity online and from abroad.

The hunger strike, in other words, is neither archaic nor obsolete. But could it move an unresponsive government? That, as Gandhi’s agitations show, is the wrong question. The real test is whether the public still cares about a just cause that has been silenced. By that measure, the fact that tens of thousands turned up at Jantar Mantar and added their voices says that the fast succeeded.

Aparna Kapadia is Professor of History at Williams College.