Delhi · september 2026
Delhi Hunger Survey
This study examines how students who undertook a hunger strike against the re-examination understood their own act. The protest arose among candidates who were required to resit a national entrance examination, and the survey asks what hunger meant to those who chose it, attending to its sensation, its emotional register and the reasons for adopting abstention as a mode of address, in a South Asian tradition that treats fasting as a form of political speech. The hunger strike is taken here to be a communicative act as well as a physical one: the body, in refusing sustenance, is made to speak where ordinary language has failed. The evidence was gathered through a self-administered online questionnaire of thirty-eight items, created and distributed through Google Forms. The instrument combined demographic and closed questions with a ten-point scale of perceived difficulty and a series of open-ended questions, several of which invited interpretive responses to visual images of hunger. Forty students from five Delhi colleges responded: Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Motilal Nehru College, Satyawati College, Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College and Sri Venkateswara College. Twenty-seven were aged 20–25, and all forty were fasting in protest for the first time. Closed items were tabulated directly, while the open answers were read closely and coded thematically. The fast proved prolonged and arduous. The median duration was approximately fifty-nine hours, thirty-one respondents abstained for at least forty-eight hours, and the mean self-rated difficulty was 7.7 out of 10. The emotions most frequently named were determination (eighteen respondents) and anger or frustration (sixteen). The students’ motives were notably outward-facing: the largest group (fourteen) cited solidarity with the aspirants and juniors who had lost a year, and an equal number chose hunger because it cannot readily be ignored. Others described it as a symbolic and moral gesture, and as a peaceable one that preserved the dignity of the cause. Visibility was largely achieved. Thirty-seven of the forty judged that the fast had made their cause more visible, and thirty-six reported the support of friends, fellow students or the public. Acknowledgement from authority was another matter. Only eight felt they had been taken seriously, thirty-two answered “somewhat” or “no”, and twenty-one described the authorities as ignoring, dismissing or minimising the protest. Eighteen recalled that their families were anxious or distressed. The results suggest a disjunction between being seen and being answered: abstention secured an audience and a measure of public sympathy, yet it did not, in the students’ account, command a corresponding response from those it addressed. Hunger functions here as testimony, a bodily witness offered where speech had been disregarded, and its efficacy depends on a listener willing to hear. The sample is small, non-random and self-reported, so the findings describe these forty respondents and cannot be generalised. Fasting durations were estimated from free-text answers, and the thematic coding was undertaken by a single coder, so the counts are interpretive. The responses form a sample dataset compiled to illustrate the survey instrument and its analysis.
