On a white mattress laid across a low stage at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk was too weak to speak. When a Reuters journalist approached on Tuesday, the 59-year-old activist could only gesture his exhaustion. A day earlier, his blood glucose had fallen to 67 mg/dL, his blood pressure hovered at 107/70, and organisers said he had lost 8.2 kilograms since beginning his fast. When Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke begged him to end the hunger strike, Wangchuk replied, according to Dipke: “Don’t ask me to end my fast. Ask the government why they won’t even have a dialogue.”

The protest Wangchuk joined on 28 June began as a satirical online campaign that, within days of its May launch, amassed 22 million Instagram followers. The CJP, which describes itself as representing “the lazy, the unemployed, and the chronically correct,” demands the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged examination irregularities, including a medical college entrance paper leak that forced the cancellation of a test taken by 2.3 million candidates. The movement has channelled a deeper frustration: government data show unemployment among Indians aged 15 to 29 hovers near 10 percent, rising to 13.6 percent in urban areas. For weeks, a rotating cast of young protesters has occupied the site near Parliament, one fainting on Monday and being taken to hospital.

Wangchuk is not a typical student leader. An engineer from Ladakh, he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2018 for developing artificial “ice stupas” that help farmers adapt to climate change, and his work inspired a beloved character in the Bollywood film 3 Idiots. He spent 170 days in detention last year before charges against him were dropped, and he describes himself as a follower of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent protest. “I’m weak from the outside, but I’m strong from inside,” he told the BBC on Monday, insisting he would take his fast “to its logical conclusion.”

That resolve has prompted a cascade of public appeals. Former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal called Wangchuk “an asset of the country” and urged him to end the fast, while Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav wrote that expecting a change of heart from the government was “utterly futile.” Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra told him, “Your goal is reached. Govt doesn’t care about your life.” More than 1,800 civil society members—including author Arundhati Roy, actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, and economist Jean Drèze—signed an open letter asking Wangchuk to withdraw, arguing that the administration “does not have a heart or a conscience” and that the struggle is “a marathon not a sprint.” The minister, meanwhile, has dismissed the CJP as “the B-team of disruptive elements” and has not responded to requests for comment on the hunger strike.

As the monsoon session of Parliament approaches, the CJP is preparing a “Chalo Sansad” march on 20 July, and organisers have warned supporters they may face arrest under stringent security laws. At the protest site, the frail figure on the mattress has become a silent rebuke: a man who built glaciers in the high desert now waits, losing muscle mass by the day, for a conversation that has not come.