India's hunger strike tradition: From map-remaking to modern protest

Potti Sriramulu died after 58 days of fasting; Irom Sharmila refused food for 16 years and was force-fed; Sonam Wangchuk has lost 9kg in 19 days and faces health deterioration.

For more than a century, India has returned again and again to one of its most ancient and morally charged forms of political speech: the deliberate refusal to eat. From Gandhi's transformations of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain fasting traditions into tools of conscience, to Potti Sriramulu's death in 1952 that literally redrew the nation's map, to Sonam Wangchuk's deteriorating body in 2024, the hunger strike endures as a ritual where flesh becomes argument. It is a practice that forces a democracy to confront the distance between its constitutional promises and its lived realities — and one that

India's hunger strike tradition: From map-remaking to modern protest

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