Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee, first staged in 1962. The title was a pun on the favored track ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’, changing the Big Bad Wolf with the title of the celebrated British author. In the identical spirit, one is tempted to ask, Who’s Afraid of Sonam Wangchuk? The Delhi Police has given many a purpose to ponder this query. For these unfamiliar, Wangchuk is an educationist and out-of-the-box thinker from Ladakh, rumoured to have impressed a key character within the movie Three Idiots. A local weather fanatic like Greta Thunberg, he, together with 120 others, started a march from Leh on September 1 to succeed in Mahatma Gandhi’s Samadhi on October 2, Gandhi Jayanti. The march was undoubtedly pushed by political calls for — statehood for Ladakh, separate Lok Sabha seats for Kargil and Leh, and inclusion of the area within the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.
Their journey, nevertheless, was as uneventful because the extinction of the dodo. Had it been allowed to proceed, Wangchuk and his group would seemingly have reached Rajghat unnoticed, very similar to the sit-in protest then-Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal staged on the similar spot whereas communal riots raged in northeast Delhi 5 years in the past. But this time, the Centre appeared decided to forestall Wangchuk from slipping by unnoticed. The group was stopped at Singur — the very place the place farmers held their floor for over a yr — and brought into police custody. Some of the marchers, with blistered ft, may need discovered the two-day detention a welcome respite. When the night of Gandhi Jayanti arrived, the group was herded onto authorities buses and brought to Rajghat, the place electrical lights illuminated their path to make sure nobody unintentionally stumbled into the samadhi. And so, by dusk, a refrain of voices rang out, Who’s Afraid of Sonam Wangchuk?
