5 Key Takeaways
- Deepak Kumar's act of shielding a Muslim shopkeeper by declaring himself 'Mohammad Deepak' led to an economic boycott and eviction from his gym.
- Sonam Wangchuk, an educator and activist, was forcibly removed from a peaceful protest and hospitalized, where he continued his hunger strike over the NEET-UG paper leak.
- The NEET-UG question paper leak on May 3 became a major rallying cry, with demands for the Education Minister's resignation and broader accountability.
- The government's heavy-handed response, including barricades and restricted access at Safdarjung Hospital, was criticized as isolating dissent and creating a 'fortress'.
- The story highlights a growing churn where individual acts of conscience are met with state force, raising questions about the space for dissent and solidarity in India.
A Gym Trainer's Defiance and an Activist's Fast: Inside the Stand at Safdarjung Hospital
Two men from different worlds converge at a barricaded hospital gate, bound by conscience and the cost of speaking up.
New Delhi — July 19, 2026
On a humid Sunday morning in the national capital, the pavement outside Safdarjung Hospital's Netaji Subhas Gate mirrored a city on edge. Heavy barricades lined the entrance. Vehicles were stopped well before the gate. Anyone attempting to walk inside was stopped, and the question was always the same: "Why do you need to go in?" The reason for the fortress-like security was 15 kilometres away at Jantar Mantar, and inside the hospital itself, where climate and education activist Sonam Wangchuk lay on a hunger strike, brought there forcibly hours earlier by the police.
In the small crowd that gathered outside the gate on July 19, 2026, one face was instantly recognisable to anyone following the fault lines of communal harmony in India. Deepak Kumar, a gym trainer from the hill town of Kotdwar in Uttarakhand, is better known by the name he gave a mob in January this year: "Mohammad Deepak." He had travelled to Delhi not for a medical appointment, not out of curiosity, but to stand beside the wife of a man he calls "Sonam sir".
Gitanjali Angmo, Wangchuk's wife, was scheduled to address the media at the hospital that morning. She called it off. But Deepak, who had spoken to her days earlier, was there anyway. "I spoke to Gitanjali ma'am a few days ago. She said my support would mean a lot to Sonam. That's why I came to meet him, but the police did not allow me inside," he said.
To understand why the presence of a gym owner from a small Uttarakhand town outside a Delhi hospital gate matters, one must rewind six months. In January 2026, Kotdwar witnessed a flashpoint that many feared would end in violence. A mob had surrounded an elderly Muslim shopkeeper who suffers from Parkinson's disease. The crowd, by all accounts, was driven by communal hostility. Deepak Kumar, a Hindu running a gym in the area, waded into the melee and shielded the trembling man. When the mob demanded his identity, he shot back with two words: "Mohammad Deepak." It was an act of solidarity so sharp and so sudden that it froze the aggression, at least for a moment.
The fallout was immediate and cruel. Rightwing Hindu groups called for an economic boycott of Deepak's gym. Customers melted away. By the end of May, as reported in these pages, his landlord had served an eviction notice. The man who put his business and safety on the line for a vulnerable stranger was being pushed out of his own livelihood. Yet, on this Sunday, he was not in Kotdwar. He was in Delhi, asking to be let inside a hospital where another man who defies the powerful lay on a hospital bed, refusing food.
Deepak had already visited the Jantar Mantar protest site where Wangchuk and the activist youth platform Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have been campaigning. He declared he would join the march to Parliament announced for the first day of the Monsoon Session, Monday. The anger that brought him to the streets was anchored in a single, explosive issue: the leak of the NEET-UG question paper on May 3. "The NEET leak should not have happened—it is affecting the future of our country," Deepak said.
That leak, which compromised the medical entrance examination taken by over 20 lakh students, has become the rallying cry for Wangchuk and the CJP. Their core demand is the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. For weeks, the protest at Jantar Mantar had been peaceful, marked by hunger strikes and all-night sit-ins. Wangchuk, an engineer, educator, and Ramon Magsaysay awardee widely respected for his work on sustainable development and education reforms in Ladakh, had become the movement's moral centre. He was not a career politician. He was a teacher pulled away from his classroom, as his supporters often said.
On the night of July 18, that peaceful protest was broken. Police moved in and forcibly removed Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar. He was taken to Safdarjung Hospital, but he did not abandon his fast. By Sunday morning, his personal physician, Dr Satish Lamba, stood outside Gate No. 2, unable to reach his patient. "I have not met him since he was taken away from the protest site forcibly. This is literally a fortress they have made," Dr Lamba said. The barricades, the refused entries, the questioning of every individual trying to access a public hospital—all of it fed a sense that the state was not simply administering a medical transfer but isolating a voice.
It was in the shadow of that fortress that Deepak Kumar voiced a despair that resonated far beyond the hospital compound. "This is a very dark time for our country. The government is not listening to anybody's demands. This is a sign of a dictatorial government," he said. He called the removal of Wangchuk from the protest site illegal and described his confinement in the hospital as prison-like. "The way Sonam sir was removed from the protest site was illegal. He is being kept inside like a prisoner is kept in jail."
These were not the words of a hardened political operative. They came from a man who, just months ago, ran a small gym, paid his bills, and kept to himself until a moment of moral clarity forced him onto a different path. The trajectory from defending a Parkinson's-afflicted shopkeeper in Kotdwar to standing outside a barricaded hospital in Delhi is a mirror of a larger churn in the country—a churn where individual acts of conscience are increasingly meeting the blunt edge of state power.
Not everyone outside the hospital gate shared Deepak's awareness of the political moment. A couple from Laxmi Nagar, Sandeep and Geeta, had come to the hospital for medical reasons and were bewildered by the obstruction. "We are not aware of any protest at Jantar Mantar. Nor do we know who Sonam Wangchuk is," they said, their frustration genuine and immediate. Their confusion underscored a parallel reality: for millions of citizens, the battles being fought at Jantar Mantar and in hospital corridors remain far away, filtered through the noise of daily survival. Yet the barricades and the police bandobast bruised their lives too, turning a routine hospital visit into an encounter with a security cordon they never expected.
Another voice in the crowd came from Pradeep Paswan, a 32-year-old daily-wage labourer who had travelled all the way from Madhubani in Bihar. He was not confused. He was angry. Paswan questioned why Wangchuk had to be physically removed when he was continuing his hunger strike even inside the hospital. "He has still not broken his fast. There was no need for the police to take him," Paswan said. He, too, vowed to march to Parliament on Monday. His journey from a distant district to the capital spoke of a mobilisation that was growing beyond urban activist circles. It was being fuelled by a simple belief: that a man refusing food to demand accountability for an education scandal should not be treated as a law-and-order problem.
The NEET-UG paper leak had already shattered the confidence of millions of families in the fairness of India's examination system. The leak, which involved the question paper being circulated before the test on May 3, had triggered nationwide protests by students and parents. The demand for the Education Minister's resignation was not confined to Wangchuk's platform; it had echoed in Parliament, on social media, and on the streets. But when Wangchuk, with the quiet authority of an educator rather than a protester, took up the cause, the movement gained a moral weight that the government found hard to dismiss—so hard, it seems, that it opted to physically lift him from the protest site instead.
The Monsoon Session of Parliament was set to begin the next day. Wangchuk and the CJP had long announced that they would march to the seat of legislative power on that first day, presenting their demands in a manner that could not be ignored. The forcible hospitalisation of their most prominent face looked, to supporters, like a pre-emptive strike. To the authorities, it was likely framed as a necessary measure to prevent a law-and-order breakdown. Whatever the legal justification, the optics were devastating: a hunger-striking educator confined in a hospital behind layers of security, while his physician and supporters stood outside pleading for access.
Deepak Kumar's presence connected two seemingly disparate threads. In Kotdwar in January, a mob harassed a Muslim man suffering from a neurological disease. A Hindu gym owner stood up and became a target himself. In Delhi in July, a Ladakhi educator was lifted from a protest site while demanding accountability for an exam that decides the futures of students across communities. Both incidents share a common element: individuals who stepped out of their assigned roles and were met with force, whether from a mob or from the institutional arm of the state. "Mohammad Deepak" was not just a name born of defiance; it had become a symbol of the refusal to let communal identity dictate human solidarity. That symbol now stood outside a hospital, hoping to show solidarity with a man from a different geography, a different community, a different struggle—but bound by the same conviction that something fundamental had gone wrong.
What happens next hinges on the march to Parliament. Wangchuk's hunger strike inside the hospital remains unresolved. His wife's cancelled media briefing suggests a strategy in flux, perhaps waiting to see how the first day of the session unfolds. The CJP has repeatedly framed their agitation not as a partisan campaign but as a citizens' demand for transparency. The presence of people like Pradeep Paswan from Madhubani, a labourer with no obvious political affiliation, adds weight to that framing. And the quiet figure of Deepak Kumar, still bearing the economic scars of his own stand, reminds everyone watching that this is not just about one exam leak or one minister. It is about the space allowed for dissent, the treatment of those who raise their voice, and the question of whether solidarity itself has become a punishable offence in the public square.
Dr Lamba's words lingered in the morning air: "This is literally a fortress they have made." The fortress was outside a hospital, not a military installation. Within it, a man who had taught children in the cold high desert of Ladakh lay refusing food, because he believed that the future of the country's students could not be pawned. Outside, a gym trainer who lost his livelihood for saying "Mohammad Deepak" waited, not allowed inside. And all around, ordinary people—some in the know, some utterly unaware—navigated a city that, on that Sunday, felt like it was holding its breath.
The march to Parliament would be the next test. For Wangchuk's supporters, the goal was clear: force the legislature to listen, to acknowledge that an exam paper leak is not a minor glitch but a breach of the social contract with the young. For the government, the challenge was equally stark: manage a session already heavy with expectation and scrutiny, while a hospital room in Safdarjung became an unplanned detention centre for a hunger-striking activist whose only weapon was the refusal to eat.
Deepak Kumar, standing outside Gate No. 2, offered no grand political theory. His presence was his statement. And when he said, "This is a very dark time for our country," the darkness he referred to was not just a mood. It was the growing sense that when individuals, whether in Kotdwar or Delhi, try to make the powerful listen, they are met with barricades, eviction notices, and the heavy hand of force. The question hanging over Parliament's opening day was whether those barricades would hold or whether the voices gathering outside—the gym trainer, the labourer from Bihar, the educator from Ladakh, and thousands of students—would finally be heard.
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