When Indira Gandhi met Sonam Wangyal, Wangchuk's father, in Ladakh: 1984 story that brought Cong to CJP stage finally

Congress MP Pawan Khera became an official party face to physically visit the protest site on Friday, July 17, meeting Sonam Wangchuk.

Forty-two years ago, an Indian prime minister flew into Leh to talk a Ladakhi leader out of starving himself over a demand for more rights for the people there. This week, as his son fasted for a cause of his own, it was that memory the Congress reached for, though it's no longer in power.

The current BJP-led government has so far been indifferent at best towards the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar, where Sonam Wangchuk is on hunger strike for 20 days and counting.

Congress MP and spokesperson Pawan Khera became the official party face to physically visit the protest site on Friday, July 17, meeting Wangchuk and other Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) members such as founder Abhijeet Dipke, at their sit-in over irregularities in the NEET-UG examination and other such issues.

Khera's visit came a day after party general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal expressed solidarity on X, and broke the Congress's official silence on the protest that the CJP pegged as “non-political” from the start.

Venugopal mentioned, however, that his own party was raising the demand for minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation too.

Rahul Gandhi, the party's preeminent leader, has chosen not to visit so far, while he is in Dehradun on July 17 for a Congress rally on the same issue.

The gradual shift in the Congress posture — leading to in-person backing via a senior emissary — reportedly followed an intervention by Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson.

A meeting of the CPP was held today under her chairpersonship on Thursday where the Congress president and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, and the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, were present, along with other MPs.

Also read | Not only Sonam Wangchuk, AISA activists on parallel hunger strike ‘at high risk’ too: ‘Shows the govt is heartless’

X thread, too, brought Indira back to memory

Sonia Gandhi cited the precedent from 42 years ago, that is, Indira Gandhi's 1984 visit to Leh to meet Wangchuk's father, Sonam Wangyal, during his own hunger strike demanding Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for Ladakh's communities, as per reports in The Indian Express and other outlets citing sources.

Before that, CJP spokesperson Saurav Das also made an X post invoking the Indira Gandhi-Sonam Wangyal meeting, and wrote, “The government must learn how to respond and accept accountability.”

He shared a post that carried a photo of that meeting. And that post was itself a response to a right-wing influencer trying to prove that Wangchuk was the product of a false narrative.

After his meeting with Wangchuk on Friday, Khera too mentioned the 1984 meeting. He also wrote: “Today, on behalf of the Congress Party, I met Shri Sonam Wangchuk and the protesters at Jantar Mantar, and urged them to end their fast in light of their deteriorating health. A movement is not strengthened by losing its people. We live to fight another day.”

Wangchuk's father, Sonam Wangyal, served as an MLC in Jammu and Kashmir from 1957 to 1967, and later as an MLA in 1967 and 1972 from the Congress, before becoming a cabinet minister in the J&K government in 1975. Having remained associated with the National Conference besides the Congress, he was part of a sustained campaign in the 1980s for ST recognition of Ladakh's communities.

In 1984, he undertook a five-day hunger strike to press the demand for ST status and related reservation and other schemes.

Then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi travelled to Leh and persuaded him to end the fast, while committing to grant his demand. She was assassinated later that year by her bodyguards over Operation Bluestar, a military intervention at the Sikh shrine complex Golden Temple in Amritsar.

It took five more years of agitation before the Centre acted as such; and in 1989 the President promulgated the Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir) Scheduled Tribes Order, granting ST status to eight communities at first. Wangyal was at one point even expelled from the Congress in 1987 over what the party termed anti-party activities. He passed away in 1998.

Son Sonam Wangchuk has remained away from active politics, but has been an activist focused on education, climate, and rights for Ladakh, having recently spent six months in jail over an agitation seeking special status for the region that was carved out as UT when Jammu and Kashmir's statehood was taken away in 2019.