When Pawan Khera turned up to meet Sonam Wangchuk at Jantar Mantar on July 17, the activist had already been fasting for nineteen days.

For the entire time that the grand old party kept its distance from the fasting environmentalist, his supporters were at pains to understand why.

Everyone at the protest site, without exception, murmured that while ruling BJP’s contempt for the agitators could still be understood and explained, Congress party’s apathy was hard to fathom.

It finally took Sonia Gandhi to nudge the party into expressing solidarity with Sonam and remind son Rahul of how late Indira Gandhi had in 1984 flown all the way to Ladakh to support a fasting Sonam Wangyal, Wangchuk’s father.

Namgyal had been demanding tribal status for parts of Ladakh — a promise Indira Gandhi made and her son Rajiv Gandhi later on kept.

That said, while Khera spent time with Sonam Wangchuk on July 17, the Congress is yet to reveal its cards on participation in Cockroach Janata Party’s march to Parliament scheduled for Monday.

CJP cadres are also wondering as to what possible harm can engagement with a pro exam reform movement do to entrenched parties like the Congress and the BJP.

Political indifference to people’s protests, most importantly street agitations, is nothing new.

That perhaps explains why fasting stays relevant and preferred to our times even though it has deeply ancient roots with generous sanctions across Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

The practice was adopted by Mahatma Gandhi as a means to fight for what he saw as right or righteous.

Documented history records that the first fast Gandhi undertook ever was in favour of the rights of workers in a mill in Ahmedabad. He later on observed 17 major fasts that ran into a cumulative of as many as 135 days. Causes were multiple but the purpose singular — persuade the perpetrator into submission by the sheer moral force of self denial.

In recent history, too, social activist Anna Hazare deployed fasting as a tool to enforce change when he sat on a 13 day hunger strike in 2011 as part of the anti corrpution movement against the then Congress led UPA government.

While fasting remains one of the most preferred means to register protests in politics — Gandhi to Potti Sreeramulu and Jatindra Nath Das to Anna Hazare used it — government responses to people’s agitations have always varied.

That however has never deterred an odd crusader from striving on.

Late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru did not give in to the demands of a fasting Sreeramulu who wanted a separate Telugu speaking state. It was his death that changed things and led to the creation of Andhra Pradesh.

A fasting Jatindra Nath Das also died in 1929. He had spoken in defence of human rights of Indian prisoners. The UPA government gave in after 13 days of Anna Hazare’s fast in 2011 and set up a joint committee with civilian participants to draft an anti-corruption law as demanded by the activist.

Though many Congress leaders still lament the move that saw then Anna supporter Arvind Kejriwal join the joint panel with the likes of Pranab Mukherjee, others say it was the right thing to do at the time because public sentiment was running strong and political expediency had become a secondary consideration. It remains to be seen how the BJP led NDA government responds to Sonam Wangchuk in the long term.

For now, it has reacted with full force of the law — by sending the activist to a central hospital in the name of a court order and in the name of his health.

Sonam’s wife Gitanjali Angmo has already declared that the activist will end his fast tomorrow if political leaders meet him in the hospital and promise to raise issues of educational accountability in the Parliament Session commencing Monday. Does this mean Sonam has already dropped the demand of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation?

Is Sonam Wangchuk’s story over or has it only paused? Monday march will tell.