Upvas extended to its furthest and most consequential form, a fast continued voluntarily until death, is called sallekhana or santhara, and it is the point at which the tradition's ordinary fasting practice ran directly into modern Indian law. The Rajasthan High Court ruled in 2015 that santhara amounted to suicide under Indian law and directed authorities to treat those who undertook or assisted it accordingly, a ruling the Jain community across India reacted to with immediate and widespread protest, arguing that the court had misunderstood a practice its own tradition insists is categorically distinct from suicide: sallekhana is undertaken openly, gradually, with a teacher's knowledge and typically only in advanced age or terminal illness, framed as the shedding of an already-dying body in a state of equanimity rather than an act of despair, whereas Jain teaching itself explicitly condemns suicide arising from passion, fear or attachment as spiritually harmful in exactly the way sallekhana is held not to be.
The Supreme Court of India stayed the Rajasthan ruling within days, allowing the practice to continue while the underlying legal question remained unresolved, and the case has not been finally decided since, leaving sallekhana in a position rare for a long-established religious practice: publicly performed, openly discussed by the community that keeps it, and still formally unsettled in the law of the country where the great majority of its practitioners live. The dispute illustrates precisely the distinction ordinary upvas observance draws in principle, between an ascetic act undertaken in equanimity and a termination sought out of despair, tested here not in doctrine but in a national court.