Rajasthan has the largest Jain population of any Indian state by some measures, and it was there that a court was asked to decide whether a Jain religious practice is a form of suicide.
Sallekhana is the voluntary reduction and eventual cessation of food and water undertaken at the end of life, in old age, incurable illness or famine, with the aim of ending a life without violence and in full awareness. Jain texts treat it as the culmination of a lay or ascetic career rather than as despair, require permission from a teacher, and distinguish it sharply from suicide, which they condemn: the criterion is the absence of passion and the presence of deliberate, gradual, witnessed detachment. Several hundred people are recorded as undertaking it in India each year.
In August 2015 the High Court of Rajasthan held the practice to be an offence under the provisions on suicide and abetment of suicide in the Indian Penal Code. The Jain community protested nationwide, and the Supreme Court of India stayed the judgment within weeks, leaving the practice legally in suspense.
The case sets two things against each other that most legal systems handle badly: constitutional protection for essential religious practice, and a criminal law written on the assumption that a person who stops eating wants to die for reasons the state should prevent. Neither the stay nor any later ruling has resolved it.