“They Are Not Saints”: Sonam Wangchuk Says CJP Leaders Have Political Ambitions and Reveals How Rahul Gandhi Was Approached to End His Fast
Educationist and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk has said the young founders of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have political ambitions and that there is nothing wrong with that. In a long conversation on Prakhar Gupta’s podcast, The Prakhar Gupta Xperience, he also disclosed that organisers tried to get Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi to formally end his 26-day hunger strike as an exit plan when the protest’s outcome looked uncertain. Gandhi’s side, Wangchuk said, did not give a positive response.
The remarks reopen two questions that followed the Jantar Mantar agitation all summer: what the CJP actually is, and why mainstream Opposition leaders, especially Congress, kept a careful distance even as Wangchuk’s fast turned a youth protest into a national story.
A Youth Platform, Not a Party — For Now
The CJP began as a satirical youth campaign after remarks by the Chief Justice of India that compared some activists and unemployed young people to “cockroaches.” It quickly became a protest over examination leaks, recruitment failures and accountability in the education system, with the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as its sharpest demand. Wangchuk joined the sit-in on 28 June and began an indefinite hunger strike. His presence changed the scale of the movement. By late July he had fasted for 26 days.
The faces of the organisation — founder Abhijeet Dipke and colleagues including Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka — were young, media-savvy and, in some cases, previously associated with the Aam Aadmi Party. That background invited the charge that CJP was a political project in disguise. Wangchuk addressed it directly.
“Politically speaking, I don’t think being associated with a political party is wrong,” he said. “As far as people saying whether they have political ambitions or not, I think they do. I have assessed them quite carefully. They will certainly have political ambitions, and they should. There is nothing wrong with that.” He added that they had never told him this was their plan. It was his reading of them. “They are not saints who want nothing for themselves.”
He described Dipke and the others as “normal Indian youth who have something to say about what is going on in the country.” They were well-meaning and skilled, he said, and he had not seen signs that they were corruptible. Allegations of foreign influence did not convince him either. Audience data available to the movement, he said, showed about 94 per cent of followers in India and 6 per cent abroad — not the ratio that would have set off “red lights.”
What he insisted on was a wall between personal ambition and the platform. “We need youth leaders, young leaders. But the platform that you started not as a political party, you should preserve its sanctity. If you keep it as a neutral, apolitical pressure group, you will be able to achieve much more. If you don’t make the platform itself political, people will have greater faith in it.”
That distinction is familiar in Indian protest politics. Anna Hazare’s movement collapsed into a party. Farm unions split over electoral alliances. Wangchuk’s advice was that CJP should stay a pressure group so it could keep governments of any colour under watch. Individuals could later join parties or start new ones. The stage itself should not become one.
The Exit Strategy That Needed Rahul Gandhi
The second revelation was more pointed. By the 15th or 16th day of the fast, Wangchuk said, nobody was sure the protest would succeed. People were already looking for a way out. “Why did Rahul Gandhi’s name come up in Parliament? Many people ask, ‘Why would Rahul Gandhi break the fast? He is in the Opposition. Why would you ask him?’”
The plan was to take the issue to Parliament. Opposition MPs would receive the protesters. The Leader of the Opposition would offer Wangchuk juice or soup, the fast would end, and the movement would withdraw and hand the file to Parliament. “That became the exit strategy,” he said.
Organisers treated the invitation as an honour. They contacted Gandhi’s side and did not get a positive reply. “Our first idea was to go to Parliament and have Rahul Gandhi break the fast. But when we worked on it and contacted them, we did not get any positive response from him.” Wangchuk said Gandhi had not come to Jantar Mantar earlier either. “If he had come himself, this would have become much bigger. He did not come, and he did not come even after that.” Some senior Congress leaders, he claimed, told the organisers they had been asked not to attend.
This matches what Wangchuk said in earlier interviews after the fast ended: his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, had worked to arrange for Gandhi to break the strike and received no favourable response. Wangchuk has used that fact to explain later remarks she made about Congress leaders, saying disappointment, not hostility, was the context.
Congress had its own track. Sonia Gandhi is reported to have pushed the party toward public solidarity, invoking an old family link with Ladakh. Party MPs eventually visited the site. Rahul Gandhi pressed the demand for Pradhan’s resignation through a separate student campaign rather than sitting at Jantar Mantar. To CJP organisers, that looked like distance. To Congress, it may have looked like caution: a youth platform with AAP-linked founders, a fast that could collapse or explode, and no interest in becoming a junior partner in someone else’s protest.
How the Fast Actually Ended
The Parliament plan never happened. Wangchuk ended the fast on 24 July after talks with Union ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh, in the presence of Ladakhi leaders. He has said there was no government pressure on him; if anything, ministers were anxious to avoid violence. His conditions narrowed from Pradhan’s resignation to written assurances that student protesters would not face cases, plus compensation for affected families. He later accused the ministers of breaking a pledge by releasing photographs of the midnight meeting before a joint, cross-party announcement.
That ending left both sides with unfinished business. CJP said the demand for the education minister’s resignation still stood. Wangchuk returned toward Ladakh asking the Centre to honour written commitments. The organisation has since named Dipke national convener and announced further protest action, including a Delhi march over unfulfilled promises.
Ambition, Neutrality and Trust
Wangchuk’s podcast comments try to hold two ideas at once. Young people who build a national movement will want power; expecting them to be monks is naïve. But the moment the platform becomes a party, a large part of the public will treat every demand as a career move. He said he would not blame the founders for ambition. He hoped the summer would make them more mature leaders. He still wanted CJP to look like a clean space for issues, not another vehicle.
Whether that line survives is now the test. Dipke and his colleagues have the following, the name recognition and the organisational skeleton of a national youth outfit. Wangchuk has the moral capital of the fast and the warning that the platform’s value is its neutrality. Rahul Gandhi’s absence from the proposed Parliament ritual is part of the same story: parties will support a student cause on their own terms, not necessarily on the terms of the people sitting at Jantar Mantar.
Wangchuk has called himself a bulldozer, not a car — useful for building a road, not for driving on it afterwards. His latest interview is him stepping off the road and telling the young drivers that ambition is allowed, saints are not required, and the moment they turn the movement into a party, much of the faith they earned this summer will drain away.
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