Tale of two reformers: How Sonam Wangchuk, Gitanjali Angmo are redefining activism and education

One of Gitanjali J. Angmo’s favourite stories is O. Henry’s ‘The Last Leaf’. In the story, a young woman battling pneumonia believes she will die when the last ivy leaf outside her window falls. Unknown to her, the last leaf she clings to—it saves her life—is not real but painted overnight by an ageing artist.

And the artist dies after braving a storm to create it.

It is a moving tale of not just sacrifice, but also of the power of alternatives. Hope comes in the form of art, not medicine. Interestingly, the ideas of sacrifice, hope and alternatives have also shaped the work of Angmo and her husband, Sonam Wangchuk, in Ladakh and beyond.

Last year, when Wangchuk was detained for six months under the National Security Act, it was Angmo who became his voice, carrying Ladakh’s concerns into the national conversation. The word Angmo is derived from Tibetan ‘Wangmo’, which means feminine power. Wangchuk says, only half-amusingly, that to best understand him is to understand Angmo first.

Their duet repeated itself this year. On the 21st day of Wangchuk’s hunger strike over the NEET paper leak, the Delhi Police forcibly removed him from Jantar Mantar. As he remained in hospital, first at Safdarjung and later at Medanta, Angmo once again stepped into the spotlight, addressing the media, participating in the protest and joining a march to Parliament.

If last year’s protest centred on Ladakh and its constitutional safeguards, this year’s was about education, which is at the heart of the couple’s work.

It was also the reason their paths crossed in the first place.

LEARNING DIFFERENTLY

At first glance, a convent-educated girl from Odisha, who learnt ballet and karate, and a boy from Ladakh who did not attend school until he was eight seem to have little in common.

“I scored well, was always among the toppers, won a gold medal and achieved academic success,” says Angmo. Yet, even as she excelled in conventional education, one question continued to trouble her: ‘What is the purpose of life?’

“The turning point came in Class 11, when I attended a youth camp at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry,” she says. “My question found an answer in the idea of the evolution of human consciousness. I learnt that the purpose of life is to constantly grow and evolve.”

Wangchuk believes his belated school admission worked in his favour because “the curiosity that comes naturally with every child was not curtailed by early rote learning”. He had the freedom to explore.

“In that sense, our lives were similar,” Angmo says. “Both of us had parents who trusted us and gave us the freedom to explore, and that freedom is fundamental to learning.”

For Wangchuk, however, mainstream schooling came as a shock. “But instead of merely complaining about what he had gone through, Sonam decided to transform the system itself,” says Angmo.

Rather than pursuing a conventional engineering career after BTech, Wangchuk founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) in 1988. It focuses on practical learning, problem-solving and self-governance. Most students are from rural Ladakh, often those who struggled in the conventional school system.

“The school is largely run by the students themselves,” says Wangchuk. “They form their own student government, which manages everything—from cleanliness and kitchens to libraries, assemblies, programmes, excursions, guest invitations and even food management.”

Wangchuk’s work has earned recognition in India and abroad. He was THE WEEK’s Man of the Year in 2001. He won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2018 for “his uniquely systematic, collaborative and community-driven reform of learning systems in remote northern India, thus improving the life opportunities of Ladakhi youth”.

Angmo, meanwhile, followed a far more conventional path. She graduated in physics, earned an MBA and went on to work with consulting firms. Though she was drawn to a transdisciplinary approach to learning even as a child, it was only after the birth of her son that she began to question what education ought to be.

“I was around 30 and asked myself: how can a child remain in the mainstream while receiving a very different kind of education? An education that does not revolve only around external success?” she says. “That is how I became an educator.”

TEACHING PURPOSE, FINDING HOME

It was education, too, that brought the two together. Wangchuk and Angmo first met at an education conference in Mumbai in 2017, where they discovered an uncanny alignment in how they thought about learning.

“It was so interesting to see that we were finishing each other’s sentences. There was so much similarity because our energies matched in the way we wanted to work in the field of education,” Angmo tells THE WEEK.

Together, they founded the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives (HIAL) in 2018. Designed to capture solar radiation and heat, the building looks nothing like a traditional institute. “It is not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative. Not just net zero, but energy positive,” Angmo says.

Both Wangchuk and Angmo discovered their ikigai—the Japanese concept that translates to ‘reason for being’—despite the education system, not because of it. “We designed lives that we genuinely love. But we know so many people who are unhappy with their lives, who simply wait for the weekend while working only to earn money. So we thought, why not create an educational curriculum and pedagogy where every child is encouraged to discover his or her own swadharma, or what the Japanese call ikigai?”

The couple live in Leh. It is home for Wangchuk, but for Angmo, adapting to life in the cold, high-altitude desert has been a journey in itself. They married in 2017 and much to the surprise of Angmo’s friends, who knew of her dislike for air conditioners, she decided to move to cooler climes.

“For me, moving from a tropical region to the high-altitude desert of Ladakh meant adapting to a completely different way of life,” she says.

The adjustments went beyond the landscape. Raised in a Punjabi-Jain family, Angmo is a vegetarian. It made food one of the biggest challenges in a region where meat is central to the local diet and fresh produce is scarce for much of the year. She also missed the water-rich fruits and vegetables she had grown up eating.

Wangchuk, meanwhile, has embraced her world as well. He has grown fond of her cooking, particularly south Indian dishes such as idli, dosa and sambar. Many of them come straight out of the recipe book of Angmo’s mother.

Yet the biggest change seems not cultural but political. Angmo could hardly have imagined that Ladakh’s struggle for constitutional safeguards, and her husband’s hunger strike for the same, would draw her into the world of activism.

FROM EDUCATION TO ACTIVISM

Ladakh’s struggle for statehood, legislature and inclusion under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution became the couple’s biggest test.

True to his Gandhian methods, Wangchuk embarked on a series of hunger strikes, which drew national and international attention. But on September 24, 2025, the 15th day of his indefinite fast, violence erupted in Leh, leaving four people dead. Wangchuk called off the fast, appealed for peace, and two days later was detained under the National Security Act (NSA) and lodged in Jodhpur Central Jail in Rajasthan.

For Angmo, the episode marked an unexpected shift. Until then, her work had largely revolved around education. Suddenly, she found herself thrust into the centre of a political movement.

That crisis only reinforced how they complement each other. “While he is on a hunger strike, I can hold the fort and make sure nothing is disrupted. Even when he was in jail for six months, nothing stopped at HIAL. We could not launch new courses, and much of the new construction stopped, but the existing work continued. There I showed patience and calmness in running everything,” she says.

They have a rule. “If one of us is upset or anxious,” she says, “the other consciously remains calm.”

When he was detained for protesting outside Delhi’s Ladakh Bhawan, Angmo put up her photograph practising karate as her WhatsApp display picture. The message, she says, was that she was ready to spar. And when news of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation broke, she was with one of her closest friends celebrating her birthday in Delhi. She hugged her and called Wangchuk immediately. As Angmo—a trained dancer and karate black belt—struggled to contain her excitement, Wangchuk remained characteristically calm.

“I may be Gen X,” she says. “But I feel like Gen Z.”

Wangchuk says that the only protest that he routinely faces is at home. “There is always a great deal of debate, discussion and even disagreement before I undertake a protest. This time, just as in the past, there was a lot of disagreement. Everyone felt I should not put my life at risk,” he says.

The worry was that the hunger strike, even if not fatal, could irreversibly damage Wangchuk’s brain and other organs.

“Yes, they protest against my protests,” he says. “But once I make a decision, they respect it as well.”

A TALE OF TWO AGITATIONS

Just as the previous year’s agitation had, Wangchuk’s protest at Jantar Mantar ended abruptly. On the 21st day of his hunger strike, he was forcibly shifted to Safdarjung Hospital.

As he was in hospital, Angmo sprang into action. She led the legal battle that secured his transfer to Medanta Hospital, where he ended his 26-day fast after receiving assurances from the Union government. The fast was broken with soup offered by Union Ministers Jitendra Singh and J.P. Nadda.

That image of Wangchuk accepting soup from representatives of the very government he had been protesting against triggered criticism. Some also questioned why he had ended the fast without securing the resignation of the education minister.

Wangchuk said he anticipated the resignation and, more importantly, feared a repeat of what had unfolded in Leh the previous year. “I could have pressed harder on the resignation. But I saw it coming anyway,” he says. “Second, I was genuinely scared by how things were developing by the night of the 23rd. That night was really frightening. Influencers were posting that something big was going to happen. Metro stations were being covered with newspapers, battalions of forces were being brought in from Bengal and Kashmir, and it all gave the impression that a crackdown was imminent.”

The memories of September 24, 2025 weighed heavily on his mind.

“Every time I saw those developments, I was reminded of what happened in Leh last year, when security forces brutally opened fire. They fired to kill. Here we were making a huge issue about pellet guns. There they used live bullets, aiming at heads and chests. Luckily, the doctors were so good that only four people died, though 10 to 15 were critically injured,” he says.

Wangchuk feared that kind of carnage. “So I decided to let go of the resignation demand and leave it to them to deal with the political consequences. My priority became securing written assurance on legal cases,” he says.

He also rejects the criticism over the way he chose to break his fast, saying there is a symbolism in it. “In Ladakh, we have had many hunger strikes, from the time of my father to my own. Our tradition is that when the government concedes your demands and you succeed, a government representative comes and feeds you. That symbolises your victory, not necessarily their defeat, but their acceptance of your demand,” he says.

He points to earlier examples: when the government ignored his demands after a fixed 21-day fast in Leh, he broke it with juice offered by a little girl. In 2024, after the Centre agreed to resume talks on Ladakh’s demands, a senior home ministry official in Delhi broke his fast. And in the 1980s, he says, his father’s hunger strike ended when prime minister Indira Gandhi herself offered him juice.

“It is a matter of cultural perception,” says Wangchuk.

REVOLUTION AND RESULTS

Wangchuk is happy the way the protest ended. “The credit goes to Gen Z, who raised their image in the eyes of their parents and the nation. I hope this will lead to a snowball effect—Gen Z believing in themselves, developing self-esteem and self-worth, and behaving responsibly as serious players in nation building.”

The resignation of Pradhan is only the first step. The larger challenge is reforming the education system itself. “It’s like a patient accepting that she is sick; only then does the treatment begin,” he says. “Now, there should be reforms not only of the examination system, but of the entire [education] system.”

Angmo believes the protest also revealed a larger generational shift. “Both the government and the opposition have now realised that this generation has moved beyond vote-bank politics. They cannot be divided and ruled in the old ways. They are focused on the larger picture, and they can recognise sincerity, or the lack of it. Political parties will also have to rethink how they engage with young people because empty promises and shallow words will no longer inspire this generation,” she says.

After a month in Delhi, the couple is back home in Leh. They travelled on the Vande Bharat to Srinagar where they spent some quiet time by the Dal Lake before flying home. For now, the immediate priority is recovery.

“Sonam has to regain his weight and strength,” says Angmo. “I have been away from work for almost ten days, so I need to return and attend to everything that was left behind.”

Their attention now returns to education—the work that brought them together in the first place. One of the focuses is the K-12 Desert Flower School at Phyang, which aims at nurturing critical thinking, practical problem-solving and ecological awareness among students.

“I am a rebel, but not without a cause,” says Angmo. “I think this is a time of introspection for our generation, for elders, to walk the talk and become living role models. So this is a wake-up call not only for the government, but for every educator, every parent.”