It is Demolition Day. Just after Sonam Wangchuk announced indefinite fast, photos—either real or in an altered location—appeared on social media, of the activist sipping water. A CCTV grab popped up, showing mucho macho cockroach Abhijeet Dipke in the five star lobby of a luxury hotel: what that has to do with his protest is mystifying. Wangchuk, who inspired a Bollywood film that took urban India on a guilt trip through Ladakh’s angst, must realise he will not trend. Dipke won’t make Amit Shah lose a night’s sleep. The problem is not the messenger. It is their model of dissent: the fast, the march, the moral outrage, the appeal to public conscience—all so 20th century.
The belief that Gandhi invented Indian resistance is a myth. The struggle against British rule began centuries before he returned from South Africa. It was not one, unified movement, but an archipelago of contradictions. Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and the early Congress petitioners genuinely believed the empire could be shamed through conscience; Dyer’s guns exposed their error. Nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak was known as the “Father of the Indian Unrest”. Aurobindo set religious sentiment afire. Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad responded in the only language the Brits knew—violence. There were swadeshi agitators, mill workers who struck work and were shot, peasant rebellions, tribal uprisings—all which colonial administrators called banditry and historians later named proto-nationalist resistance. Gandhi did not replace this multiplicity. The fast as a weapon is not ancient Hindu tradition transplanted into modern politics; Gandhi only dressed it in those robes. He authored a resistance perfectly calibrated to the specific vulnerabilities of a specific opponent: the optics of colonial brutality at an unarmed man in a loin cloth whose crime was just refusing to eat. Publicly self-inflicted suffering and its public visibility forced the empire into a quandary: respond with force and confirm the charge of tyranny; negotiate and confirm that the weapon worked. The post war world and the growing worldwide anti-imperial sentiment created the moral theatre for Gandhi’s suffering to turn into political leverage. The Raj had its enemies to bother about: Westminster liberals, American media and progressives, the League of Nations. Narendra Modi’s government has no equivalent vulnerability. It is not an occupying power, but a democratically elected majoritarian government with a genuine electoral mandate, an extraordinarily disciplined media management apparatus, and a political base that does not empathise with the suffering of a Ladakhi activist or a US-returned student protester.
Wangchuk and Dipke are competing against an indifferent government, IPL highlights, Bollywood, contradictory takes on the economy, and the infinite scrolling that has become the default texture of Indian consciousness. The UPA handled protest stupidly. It arrested Hazare and created a martyr. It fumbled its optics in real time and gave AAP needed momentum. Anna Hazare, that most poignant of anachronisms, has threatened to fast again to reclaim a forever lost relevance. It won’t work. The current establishment believes engagement is the enemy and reaction is oxygen. Its response to a protest is not with state repression that always generates heroes, international coverage, and documentaries. Its strategy is to create managed irrelevance. Protest is not banned; it is simply absent on prime-time and editorials. In rural India, where the majority of the electorate lives, literacy is uneven, and digital access is mediated through village WhatsApp groups and regional television. The BJP understood that the battle for political reality is won or lost at the level of the village, the mohalla, the family dinner table et al.
The BJP has effectively colonised India’s cultural sphere by understanding popular cinema, religious festivals, folk music, and WhatsApp mythology are the very mediums in which politics is conducted today. The Opposition has ceded its terrain, and retreated into a secular, English-medium, metropolitan register that is politically suicidal in a country where the deepest currents of collective identity run through temples, local saints, and regional myths. Gandhi won his war with a strategic invention. He studied the battlefield contours, his opponent’s weaknesses, and engineered a brand new movement that flourished in that climate; and the secular ecosystem to come later. Modi is not Mountbatten. BJP’s algorithm is not the Raj. Wangchuk’s despair is real, but the audience is elsewhere. The next person who could actually make this establishment get up and take notice will not be fasting. They will be building a storm of change in the opposite India of today—quietly, unglamorously, and in languages that don’t trend on English X (formerly Twitter) and in villages which no longer watch TV. Wangchuk, Dipke, the farmer, the Muslim activist, and Leftist student are not that person.
So, Amit Shah will continue to sleep soundly. He always does.