India, July 20 -- Sonam Wangchuk is starving, and in the meantime, the Republic is practising its art of looking the other way, much as it did in Manipur and elsewhere.

For over three weeks, one of the nation's distinguished educationists, environmental visionaries, and public intellectuals has subjected himself to the ultimate ultima ratio available within a constitutional democracy: the voluntary mortification of his own body. Each passing day records another medical bulletin chronicling muscular atrophy and physiological decline. Yet the sovereign response has been a silence so deliberate that it has taken on the character of public policy.

The historical juxtaposition is impossible to ignore. Barely a decade ago, Anna Hazare's anti...