Right as Sonam Wangchuk entered the 21st day of his fast, authorities whisked him away, covering his path from the stage at the Jantar Mantar protest site to the waiting ambulance with a wall of white curtains.
Mr.
Wangchuk tried to raise his hand beyond the curtains, and it appeared for a split second before he was ushered in and sped off.
Wangchuk, 59, has emerged as an unlikely symbol of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)’s weeks-long youth-led protests across the country, now centred in the heart of the capital.
The mythology surrounding Mr.
Wangchuk is ever evolving: from stories of how he concealed his family pedigree — his father Sonam Wangyal, a mountaineer and former MLA — to gain admission to an engineering college as an ordinary student, to becoming the face of climate demonstrations in ecologically sensitive Ladakh in 2023, and, last year, to championing the region’s demand for greater autonomy.
Here’s Sonam Wangchuk’s profile
