It is a strange thing, hunger. For most of us, hunger is an inconvenience. A missed meal. A delayed lunch. A stomach rumbling between meetings. For a chef, hunger is almost always something to answer – with bread, with dal, with a bowl placed before another human being. But sometimes, hunger is not an emptiness asking to be filled. It is a silence asking to be heard.At Jantar Mantar in Delhi, Sonam Wangchuk has completed 20 days of an indefinite fast. His body has grown lighter. Meanwhile, the questions surrounding him have grown heavier. And I find myself wondering: how did we arrive at a place where a man must stop eating so that a nation might start listening?I write this not as a member of the government or the opposition. Not as an expert on examinations, administration or electoral strategy. I write as a citizen of India, who loves this country enough to believe that disagreement is not disloyalty, dissent is not destruction and democracy is not diminished when people protest. Instead, it is demonstrated.A nation without protests is not necessarily a nation at peace. Sometimes, it is merely a nation in which people have stopped believing that anyone will listen. That should frighten us far more than a crowd at Jantar Mantar.The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) – its name itself irreverent, insurgent and almost absurdist – has gathered young people around anxieties about examinations, alleged irregularities, accountability and the future. One may agree with every demand, some demands or none. That is almost beside the point.Democracy does not require agreement before it grants an audience. It requires engagement. Students are not enemies of the state because they ask questions of it. Governments are not tyrannies merely because citizens disagree with them. And protestors do not become patriots only when history later decides they were right. The democratic compact is more difficult, more delicate and far more beautiful than that.It says:You may challenge me and I will still recognise you as mine.That is the miracle.We live in an age when disagreement has become a declaration of war. Across the world, politics has hardened into camps, countries into echo chambers, citizens into caricatures. Every question is treated as an accusation. Every criticism becomes conspiracy. Every conversation arrives already armed. But India should know better.Also read: Sonam Wangchuk Has Aimed a Gandhian Tool at the Wrong TargetWe are a civilization of argument. The Mahabharata is not a book about certainty. It is a vast, bewildering ocean of competing duties, wounded loyalties, imperfect choices and unanswered questions. Before the first arrow flies at Kurukshetra, there is conversation. Arjuna questions. Krishna answers. Arjuna questions again.Imagine that.One of our civilization’s foundational texts begins not with obedience but with doubt. Arjuna lowers his bow. He refuses, for a moment, to proceed. And Krishna does not call him an anti-national. He speaks to him.New Delhi: Stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra, (right), with climate activist Sonam Wangchuk amid the activist’s hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Wangchuk has been on an indefinite hunger strike for 20 days, Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.The Bhagavad Gita is born from a conversation between paralysis and purpose, between power and conscience. Its greatest lesson is not that questions are a weakness. It is that action without examination can become blindness.Today, our Kurukshetra is not a battlefield of bows and arrows. It is the space between the citizen and the state. Between a student holding an examination admit card and an institution wielding authority. Between young people asking whether systems are fair and a government carrying the enormous burden of governing 1.4 billion human beings. This is precisely where democracy must do its finest work – not when everyone agrees but when they do not.I want to say something to Sonam Wangchuk:“Sir, please eat. Please stop this fast. Not because your questions do not matter, but because they do. Not because your protest has failed, but because your body has already spoken with terrible eloquence.20 days is long enough for hunger to become a headline, a warning, a wound. India needs your mind more than it needs your martyrdom. A democracy should not require a citizen to disappear physically in order to become visible politically.”And I want to say something, with equal respect, to the Government of India:“Please listen. Not capitulate. Not surrender. Not accept every allegation as fact or every demand as automatically just.Listen.Invite the students in. Invite representatives of the protest. Put facts on the table. Explain what can be done, what cannot be done, what has already been done and what requires investigation. If mistakes were made, acknowledge them. If accusations are incorrect, answer them with evidence.”The strongest government is not the one that never bends. It is the one that knows the difference between bending and listening. A tree that cannot bend with the wind does not prove its strength. It proves its brittleness. India is not brittle.Our democracy has survived assassinations and emergencies, wars and riots, coalitions and landslides, poverty and pandemics. It has survived because beneath all our noise lies something stubbornly sacred: the belief that the Indian citizen matters. That belief must never become ceremonial.Mahatma Gandhi understood the terrible moral force of fasting. But perhaps the greater tribute to Gandhi today would be to build a democracy in which fasting unto death is no longer necessary to open a door.B.R. Ambedkar gave us something even more enduring than protest: constitutional method. Institutions. Argument. Representation. The slow, sometimes frustrating architecture through which anger can become action without becoming anarchy.We need both traditions now. The moral urgency of Gandhi. The institutional intelligence of Ambedkar. Conscience and Constitution; compassion and process; protest and parliament.CJP supporters gather during a hunger strike demanding action over alleged irregularities in examinations and seeking the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, Sunday, July 5, 2026, Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia. Because democracy is not a dinner party where everyone agrees on the menu. It is a vast Indian thali (plate) of contradiction – sweet beside sour, bitter beside beautiful and fiery beside soothing. The miracle is not that every flavour becomes the same. The miracle is that they remain on the same plate.For years, I lived in America and watched a democracy argue with itself. Sometimes magnificently. Sometimes disastrously. I returned to India believing, perhaps more deeply than before, that our greatest strength is not unanimity. It is accommodation. We contain multitudes because we have had to. Languages, religions, castes, cuisines, climates, philosophies, gods, atheists and arguments. India has never been a single note. We are a raga. And a raga requires tension. It needs ascent and descent, pause and improvisation, discipline and freedom.Remove the tension and you do not get harmony. You get silence. And silence is not always peace. This is why I am proud that young Indians protest. Yes, proud.I may not agree with every slogan. I may dislike the language of some movements. I may question their methods or conclusions. But a young person who still believes that standing in the heat, raising a placard, asking a question and demanding an answer means that someone has not given up on the country. That a young person is invested in it.Indifference is more dangerous than dissent. Cynicism is more corrosive than criticism. The citizen who says, “Nothing will ever change,” has already left democracy emotionally. The protestor, however inconvenient, is still knocking on its door.Open it.And to those protesting: “Remember that democracy also asks something of you. Protest must remain peaceful. Facts must matter. Opponents must not become enemies. Anger cannot be allowed to erase accuracy.”The right to question power carries with it the responsibility not to manufacture truth. Democracy is a discipline for everyone. The government must listen. The citizen must reason. The institution must answer. The protestor must remain peaceful. The press must investigate. And all of us must resist the intoxicating temptation to turn every disagreement into good versus evil.The Mahabharata itself warns us against such simplicity. There is dharma on every side and failure on almost every side. Bhishma is noble and wrong. Karna is generous and wounded and complicit. Yudhishthira is righteous and flawed. Arjuna is heroic and hesitant.Sonam Wangchuk being attended by medical professionals during a hunger strike by CJP at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Friday, July 3, 2026, Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav.Human beings are complicated. Governments are made of human beings. Movements are made of human beings.Democracy exists because none of us possesses the whole truth. So, let this moment become something larger than a hunger strike. Let representatives of the government meet Sonam Wangchuk and the students. Let there be a serious, transparent conversation. Let an independent process examine what needs examination. Let disagreement remain disagreement without becoming dehumanisation. And then, please, let someone place a bowl of food before Sonam Wangchuk.Let him eat. Let the students speak. Let the government answer. Let India show the world what a mature democracy can do when confronted not by an enemy, but by its own children asking difficult questions.Also read: As Sonam Wangchuk’s Fast Enters 20th Day, Academics and Artists Appeal: You Are Too Precious to LoseThe Gita tells us that we have a right to action, not ownership of its fruits. Perhaps, that wisdom belongs to governments and protestors alike. Do the right thing without first demanding victory. Speak without needing to humiliate. Listen without fearing that listening means losing.The world today has enough strongmen. What it desperately needs are strong democracies. And strength, true strength, is not the absence of dissent. It is the ability to hear dissent without trembling.Sonam Wangchuk has fasted for 20 days. His body has spoken. The students have spoken. Now democracy must speak – not through silence, not through slogans, not through suspicion, but through conversation. Because protest is not a crack in the nation. Sometimes it is light entering through the wall.And perhaps patriotism, at its most profound, is simply this: the courage to knock, the grace to open, and the wisdom to sit across the table from one another before anyone else has to go hungry.Mr Wangchuk, please eat.Students, keep speaking.Government, please listen.And India – ancient, argumentative, astonishing India – show us once again that democracy is not weakened by the questions of its people. It is worthy of its name only when it answers them.Suvir Saran is a chef, cookbook author, educator as well as a farmer who specialises in bringing Indian cooking to the American kitchen.