Wangchuk’s hunger strike highlights the gap between embodied activism and digital spectatorship: The activist’s physical sacrifice contrasts with Instagram users’ low-cost, performative solidarity through reposts and stories.

Instagram activism often functions as identity performance: It generates moral capital and social approval (Goffman, moral grandstanding) rather than sustained commitment, turning causes into temporary social accessories driven by FOMO.

The platform encourages simplification and episodic outrage: Complex issues are reduced to emotionally charged binaries, with high visibility but little institutional memory, organization, or follow-through beyond the trending moment.

At New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk’s body has once again become the site of a political argument. On 28th June 2026, the so called educationist and environmental activist joined the agitation associated with the Cockroach Janta Party – an online-born youth movement protesting alleged examination irregularities, and began an indefinite hunger strike. The protesters have demanded accountability over reported paper leaks, reforms in the examination system and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By 17th July, Wangchuk’s fast had entered its twentieth day, his weight had reportedly fallen by nearly nine kilograms, and doctors were warning of potentially serious damage to his organs. The Delhi High Court had also ordered daily monitoring of his health.

The contrast surrounding the protest is sociologically striking. Wangchuk lies physically weakened at Jantar Mantar, undertaking an extreme and potentially irreversible form of political action. Around him is a movement that was substantially born, named and popularised through the internet. The Cockroach Janta Party transformed a disparaging description of unemployed young people into a shared identity, accumulated a large digital following and subsequently attempted to convert online resentment into occupation of a physical protest space. The movement has now announced a march towards Parliament, illustrating how a digitally assembled public can sometimes cross the boundary between online expression and organised collective action.

Yet the public response to Wangchuk’s hunger strike also exposes the central contradiction of Instagram-era activism. Images of his visibly deteriorating health circulate rapidly. Celebrities, politicians, commentators and ordinary users upload appeals, clips and solidarity messages. A one-day mass hunger strike held on 16 July was itself advertised through social-media mobilisation. The cause becomes highly visible, but visibility does not necessarily create understanding, organisation or lasting commitment.

For many Instagram users, Wangchuk’s protest is encountered not as a complicated dispute concerning examination governance, institutional accountability and the anxieties of India’s aspirational youth, but as another morally urgent item in a continuously refreshing feed. A dramatic photograph is........

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