hunger strike
- Key People:
- Bobby Sands
- Related Topics:
- civil disobedience
- nonviolence
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hunger strike, form of nonviolent protest in which a person refuses to eat for a prolonged period of time until certain demands are met. Hunger strikes have been staged to draw attention to various national independence movements and such causes as women’s suffrage, prisoners’ rights, and workers’ rights. Famous hunger strikers include the American suffragist Alice Paul, the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) officer Bobby Sands, the American labor leader Cesar Chavez, and the Russian anti-corruption activist and opposition leader Aleksey Navalny.
First hunger strikes and the Russian revolutionary movement
The first major hunger strikes in modern history are believed to have taken place in late 19th-century Russia, organized by political prisoners who had been sentenced to hard labor for revolting against tsarist rule. In 1878 male prisoners in St. Petersburg began refusing food to protest the prison’s inhumane conditions. After three days the prisoners’ families pleaded with the head of Russia’s military police, Gen. N.V. Mezentsev, to help end the strike. Reportedly, Mezentsev’s response was, “Let them die. I have already ordered coffins for them all.” Later that year he was rewarded for his callousness by being assassinated by a revolutionary dissident and former artillery officer, Sergius Kravchinskii.
In 1888–89 several hunger strikes were conducted by female political prisoners (joined in at least one strike by male prisoners) in eastern Siberia to protest the transfer of another prisoner, Yelizaveta Kovalskaya. The Siberian strike continued until one of the prisoners (a woman) died from being flogged and five of the prisoners (both men and women) who willfully ate poison in protest of the killing died as a result.
News of such events was recorded in British and American newspapers and magazines along with exposés of the horrible prison conditions to which Russian political dissidents were being subjected. Kravchinskii himself fled to London and became the editor of a newspaper, Free Russia, that documented the revolutionary movement and the hunger strikes.
About this time the term hunger strike was coined as an English translation of the Russian word golodofka (literally, “famine fast”).
Women’s suffrage
Women suffragists of the early 20th century adopted the “Russian method” of staging hunger strikes to demand recognition as political prisoners, a status that would afford them more rights than being classified as common criminals. The first of these women was Marion Wallace Dunlop in London in 1909. In June of that year she was arrested for using a stamp to print the words “Votes for Women” on a wall at the House of Commons. In July she began a hunger strike while incarcerated at Holloway Prison, and she was released after 91 hours.
Other suffragists followed suit, notably Alice Paul, an American who had gone to England to study social work and became involved with the British movement for women’s suffrage. Returning to the United States in 1910, she became a leader in the American movement. In 1917 she led a hunger strike after she and other women were arrested for picketing the White House, the first time in history that protests had been staged there. Their prison conditions were terrible; thus, the women refused to eat in further protest.
In response to their hunger strike, prison guards restrained and forcibly fed Paul. In fact, many British and American suffragists who participated in hunger strikes were forcibly fed through a nasal tube, resulting in damage to their teeth, throat, and lungs. Force-feeding came to be seen as a brutal form of coercion, and vivid accounts from those who had been subjected to it were printed in newspapers, which helped drum up sympathy for the women’s cause.
Indian peace movements
Mahatma Gandhi undertook several fasts for political purposes, although these also had a religious basis. Gandhi’s childhood was steeped in Vaishnavism as well as Jainism, an Indian religion that teaches a path to spiritual purity and enlightenment through disciplined nonviolence (ahimsa, literally “noninjury”) to all living creatures.
In 1924 Gandhi fasted for three weeks in an appeal for peace between warring Hindu and Muslim communities in India. In 1932, while imprisoned for his campaign of nonviolent resistance against British rule in India, he began a fast to protest the British government’s support of a new Indian constitution that would segregate the so-called “untouchables” (the lowest level of the Indian caste system, now called Scheduled Castes or Dalits) into separate electorates, which would effectively disenfranchise them and further divide Indian society. He ended his fast after six days, his protest having spurred the Dalits and the leaders of the Hindu community to devise an alternative electoral arrangement that was supported by the British government.
Irish nationalist movements
In Ireland thousands of hunger strikes were staged between 1917 and 1923 by Irish nationalists protesting British rule. Among the longest of these occurred in Cork in August 1920, when 60 nationalists who had been imprisoned without trial began a hunger strike that lasted 94 days. By the time it ended, three men had starved to death, including Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork. MacSwiney, a local IRA leader, had been imprisoned for possession of seditious materials and a cipher key. He launched his strike one day after the other prisoners’ and was eventually transferred to Brixton Prison in London. Most of the prisoners were released or transferred. However, nine men, described in the Irish Independent as “practically reduced to skeletons,” remained incarcerated and survived to the end of the strike, which was finally halted at the request of Arthur Griffith, a leader of the Sinn Féin movement and the acting president of Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish parliament).
In the 1970s and early ’80s, IRA prisoners in British prisons staged several hunger strikes and other protests to demand political-prisoner status and humane conditions. These protests culminated in a staggered hunger strike that was begun on March 1, 1981, led by Bobby Sands (an IRA member who was elected to the British Parliament 41 days later), the first of 23 prisoners to refuse food. Sands died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days of self-starvation. Nine other hunger strikers also died. The longest-surviving of these was Kieran Doherty, a member of the Irish parliament who lasted 73 days before dying. Several prisoners were removed from the strike by their families or as a result of medical problems, while others ended their strike voluntarily. The hunger strike ended on October 3 of that year, but not without provoking worldwide condemnation of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had refused to compromise with the strikers. Shortly thereafter, most of the strikers’ demands were granted.
American farmworkers’ rights movement
Drawing inspiration from Gandhi as well as St. Francis of Assisi, Cesar Chavez was committed to nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to protest the mistreatment of migrant farmworkers. In 1965 he began leading a labor strike for higher wages for California grape pickers. The strike lasted five years and involved such tactics as a nationwide grape boycott. In 1968 Chavez went on a 25-day fast in which he refused everything but water. During the entire fast, he stayed in a windowless room at the headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) in Delano, California, leaving only to walk to a daily Roman Catholic mass.
In 1972 Chavez began another hunger strike, in protest of a new law in Arizona that restricted farmworkers’ ability to organize. This strike lasted 24 days. His last hunger strike was also his longest. In 1988 he began fasting in protest of the use of pesticides in grape fields, which the UFW contended was harmful to grape pickers’ health. He ended his fast after 36 days, by which time he had lost 33 pounds (15 kg) and was suffering from nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and cramps.
21st-century hunger strikes
Hunger strikes remained a common method of protest in the 21st century. In 2021 the Russian opposition politician Aleksey Navalny launched a hunger strike while incarcerated in a penal colony, to which he had been sentenced in 2021 for having allegedly violated the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence for fraud charges.
Navalny had been incarcerated by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s administration on numerous occasions for what were regarded by many activists as politically motivated reasons. In 2020 Navalny had been poisoned with a complex nerve agent, for which Navalny blamed the Russian government. After he was imprisoned the following year, he began a hunger strike in protest of what he said was inadequate medical care for health problems caused by the poisoning. He had also been denied an examination by his own doctor. He ended his strike after three weeks. Navalny died in February 2024 while in Russian custody in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
Other notable hunger strikes
Other notable hunger strikes of the early 21st century include one in Kyrgyzstan in 2012 in which nearly 7,000 prisoners refused to eat in protest of poor prison conditions. After being threatened with force-feeding, almost 1,300 of the hunger strikers sewed their lips shut, leaving only enough space for liquids. In 2013 some 30,000 prisoners in California refused to eat in a statewide protest of long-term indefinite solitary confinement as a form of punishment. The strike had been organized by four men who themselves were in solitary at Pelican Bay State Prison.
The longest hunger strike in history was waged by Indian activist Irom Sharmila from 2000 to 2016. She began her fast after 10 civilians in the state of Manipur were killed by soldiers under the privilege of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a security law that grants the Indian armed forces sweeping powers to maintain public order in so-called “disturbed areas.” Her campaign led to her being detained in a hospital where she was force-fed through a nasal tube. She ended her fast on the 74th anniversary of the Quit India Movement, announcing that she planned to enter politics. Her first food in 16 years was honey.