The hunger strike has always occupied a peculiar place in the political imagination of the subcontinent, deriving its power from a simple proposition: That the deliberate infliction of suffering upon oneself can awaken the conscience of another. In a land where famine was once a familiar spectre, beyond being a biological fact, hunger was also a social and moral fact. Mahatma Gandhi fasted repeatedly to prick the conscience of both the colonial state and his own followers. Irom Sharmila refused food for 16 years in protest against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, though to little avail — she was kept alive by being forcefully fed through a tube that went down her nose to her oesophagus and directly into her stomach. Even today, in Madhya Pradesh’s Chhatarpur district, tribal families are on hunger strike against the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, hoping that self-denial might succeed where petitions and prayers have failed.

But does hunger still possess the same moral resonance in an age of abundance? For many Indians today, food has become something summoned by an app and delivered to the doorstep within minutes. We are no longer really hungry; we have cravings. We eat because we can. The discomfort of an empty stomach has become unfamiliar to many of us, making it harder, perhaps, to comprehend what it means when someone voluntarily embraces that discomfort, and then pushes beyond it.

The body, however, understands hunger with brutal clarity. It first consumes its glycogen stores as blood sugar and insulin levels fall. The liver and muscles release their reserves before the body shifts into ketosis, burning fat to stay alive. Metabolism slows in an effort to conserve energy. Weight drops. The body becomes cold. Muscles weaken. Fatigue becomes constant. Eventually, even fat reserves are exhausted. The body then enters a far more terrifying phase, consuming its own tissues in a desperate search for energy. Finally, it begins breaking down the heart muscle itself. Cardiac arrest is the final stage, because by then the body has exhausted every possible compromise with death. Environmentalist G D Agrawal, who fasted for 111 days demanding a clean and free-flowing Ganga, died in October 2018 after pushing his body to precisely that point.

A hunger strike, then, is not simply the refusal of food. It is the deliberate transformation of one’s own body into an argument. Unlike almost every other form of protest, it threatens no one except the protester and its power lies entirely in the hope that another human being will find such suffering impossible to ignore.

My grandmother — god bless her — was wrong. I realise now that the story of Lord Krishna and the single grain of rice was less a story about hunger than it is about the ethics of offering. Draupadi had almost nothing left to give, yet she offered it anyway. The miracle lay not in the grain itself but in the willingness to recognise another’s need and respond, however inadequately.

That is what every hunger strike ultimately demands. Not necessarily complete agreement, nor immediate surrender, but an acknowledgement that another person’s suffering deserves an answer. This is what those whom Wangchuk and his fellow protestors are addressing need to do. The grain of rice is a metaphor for the smallest act of engagement, the minimum gesture that says: I see your hunger, and I will not pretend it does not exist. In an age of extraordinary abundance — of food, of wealth, of information, of power — even that smallest offering seems increasingly beyond our reach. And that, perhaps, more than the hunger itself, is what should trouble us.

The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. Pooja.pillai@expressindia.com