Congress’s Anna Hazare Lesson: Why Rahul Gandhi Backs Students Yet Skips the Wangchuk Hunger Strike

History has a way of nudging politicians back onto familiar streets. When Anna Hazare marched in Delhi back in 2011, the then‑UPA government looked rattled, and a fledgling anti‑corruption outfit eventually morphed into the Aam Aadmi Party – the very rival that now haunts Congress in Delhi and Punjab.

Fast forward to July 2026, and the party’s memory of that episode is anything but fuzzy. A fresh wave of unrest has bubbled up around a very different issue: paper leaks in university exams. The cockroach‑named “CJP” (Cockroach Janta Party) has been rallying students, and the name Sonam Wangchuk has become synonymous with hunger strikes at Jantar Mantar.

Enter Rahul Gandhi. Rather than standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder with Wangchuk, he launched the “Chhatron Ki Goonj” campaign, a modest‑sounding but politically calculated effort to give the Congress a visible face among aggrieved students. In speeches he has lambasted the government’s handling of exam security, but he has stopped short of stepping onto the protest ground.

Insiders say the decision was deliberate. In a closed‑door strategy session, Gandhi reportedly warned that “if we let a lone activist become the poster child, we hand them legitimacy and risk another Anna‑type backlash.” The party wants the narrative to stay tethered to its own banner, not to an external crusader whose appeal could snowball beyond the campuses.

So the Congress is playing a middle road – offering verbal support, circulating pamphlets, and promising a parliamentary probe, while keeping its senior leaders far from the hunger‑strike lane. It’s a tightrope act: acknowledge a genuine grievance without gifting the opposition a rallying point that could erode the party’s already fragile urban base.

Whether this calculated distance will resonate with students remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the ghosts of Anna Hazare’s anti‑corruption march still whisper in the corridors of the Congress headquarters, urging caution, control, and a very carefully measured brand of activism.