Fasting to death for politics, religion and pain relief

Dorothy and Armond Rudolph, both in their nineties, were recently evicted. The Rudolphs, who had met at church in 1941 and were living at an assisted living facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico decided to stop eating and drinking in order to hasten their deaths.

“Life is miserable,” Dorothy told reporters. “You name it, I’ve had it.” Armond was suffering from spinal stenosis, a painful narrowing of the spine; both were in the early stages of dementia and had increasing mobility problems.

The facility told police the Rudolph’s were attempting suicide and terminated the couple’s lease. Their children moved them into hospice care, where they carried out their intentions. “It’s not suicide,” said son Neil Rudolph. “It’s controlled death. They have the right to stop eating and drinking.” Last week, Dorothy and Armond both died. Fasting to death is an uncommon way to go in the US but that’s not the case in other parts of the world, where the practice occurs as either a sanctioned religious act, or a defiant political one.

Jainism, a religion with millions of followers in northern India and sects worldwide, advocates non-violence toward all living things. All life has karma, Jain philosophy holds, and consuming even say the seeds of a strawberry or the bacteria in water is akin to murder. Devout Jains eat a strictly vegetarian diet, destroying as little life as possible. The surest way to reduce one’s consumption of life is through the process of Santhara, or fasting to death.

The Press Trust of India reports that 240 Indian Jains carry out Santhara each year. The practice dates back to 250 B.C., according to rare Jain manuscripts preserved at the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, a museum in the Indian state of Gujarat. A 2,000 year-old Jain scripture called the “Samadhi-maran-payanna” states that between 250 B.C. and 700 A.D. there were 24 cases of Santhara. From 700-1650 A.D. there were 35 cases, from 1800-1992, 37, and from 1993-2003, there were 350 cases.

One highly publicized recent case was that of Vimla Devi Bhansali, a 60 year-old woman from the Rajasthan city of Jaipuir who was suffering from an incurable brain tumor as well as liver cancer. A Jain, she desired to end her life by Santhara—“I want to give up my body before it gives me up,” she declared. Bhansali fasted for 13 days and on the 14th, she died. While suicide is regarded as a hasty act of desperation and considered immoral in the eyes of Jainism and illegal by Indian law, Santhara is not. “Santhara is a spiritual concept where a person tunes his or her soul with the divinity before voluntarily relinquishing one’s body,” said one Indian scholar in a 2006 Express Indian article.

Political fasting deaths are not always so elegant. In pre-Christian Ireland, hunger strikers would lay themselves down to die upon the doorsteps of their offender’s homes, a custom known as Troscadh or Cealachan. The early 20th century suffragist Marion Dunlop, who was imprisoned for throwing small stones through a window on London’s Downing Street and refusing to pay the resulting fine, carried out a hunger strike in prison and eventually had to be force fed. Gandhi engaged in several hunger strikes, protesting British rule of India. In 1981, Bobby Sands and nine other Irish republican paramilitary prisoners died in a hunger strike protesting Britain’s treatment of Northern Irish prisoners. Imprisoned Cuban dissident and poet Pedro Luis Boitel died after a 53 day hunger strike in 1972. More recently, Cuban psychologist Guillermo Farinas has carried out nearly two dozen hunger strikes in protest against various forms of censorship by the Cuban regime, including a strike in 2006 against internet censorship.

One of the most politically charged fasting deaths of the last century was that of Rasaiah Parthipan, aka Lt. Col. Thileepan. Born in Jaffna, Sri Linka he joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in their fight against Indian colonization and became one of the group’s leaders in the Jaffna peninsula. On September 15, 1987 he began fasting, declaring he wanted Tamil prisoners released and India to stop policing and colonizing his country. He died 12 days later.

“I am confident that our people will, one day, achieve their freedom,” Thileepan stated before dying. “It gives me great satisfaction and contentment that I am fulfilling a national responsibility to the nation.”