On 20 July, the opening day of Parliament’s monsoon session, Delhi Police met a march of students at the barricades short of the Lok Sabha with tear gas and a lathicharge. More than a hundred were injured, some seriously. In the lead-up to the march, Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk—on a hunger strike to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for the NEET paper leaks—had been forcibly carried to a hospital bed. Congress leaders protested outside Prime Minister Modi’s residence on the 21st, only for Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi to be unceremoniously dragged away by the police. Pradhan then finally took to X for his first public statement since the beginning of the agitation: To attack the dharna, calling it an “inconvenience to the public”.
The irony is profound, coming from an avowedly Hindu nationalist party. Dharna is among the oldest Sanskritic words the subcontinent has for the act of forcing a debtor to pay their dues. It was widely practiced by Brahmin, merchant, and poet communities across northern India and particularly in Varanasi, PM Modi’s home constituency. Even the most authoritarian ancient thinker, Chanakya—with whom Home Minister Amit Shah has been favourably compared by fawning media—warned that rulers must listen to aggrieved subjects, not disperse them with lathicharges.
Fasts and the king
In the Brahminical dharmashastra literature, dharna, literally ‘holding up’ is one of the recognised ways of recovering a debt. The wronged party (typically a Brahmin priest) fasts at the debtor’s doorway, with the intention of starving to death. The death of a supplicant was believed to inflict the sin of Brahmanicide, viewed with particular horror in premodern India. However, this practice wasn’t unique to Brahmins. The threatened fast unto death, also known as praya, is undertaken by many figures who loom large in the Hindu imagination. In Book X of the Mahabharata, for example, Draupadi embarks on a fast to demand that her husbands avenge the night-time massacre of her sons. Some early Jatakas also mention fasts to the death. Though these examples come from elite, literary worlds, dharna in India has historically been a weapon of the weak against the strong.
While the historical record is uneven, premodern chroniclers did seem to think that the king was bound by duty and dharma to heed hunger strikes. As historian John Nemec writes in his paper ‘Dying to Redress the Grievance of Another’ (2017), the great chronicle of medieval Kashmiri kings—the twelfth-century Rajatarangini written by Kalhana—uses this to measure the virtue of rulers past. On many occasions in the Rajatarangini, a group goes on hunger strike either for themselves, for someone else, or for the benefit of society at large.
Kalhana was particularly taken with King Yashaskara (r. 939–948 CE), who came to power after a group of Brahmins starved themselves to pressure the court to appoint him as ruler. As king, Yashaskara set up a dedicated palace office, the praya-upavesha-adhikrita (prāyopaveśādhikṛta), whose officers watched for anyone who sat down to fast against the crown, ensuring that no petition died unheard. This helped save a starving petitioner who had been defrauded with the connivance of a palace official (Rajatarangini Book VI verse 14).
Set against him is the king Jayapida, grandson of the famous Lalitaditya Muktapida. Jayapida was an erudite patron of poets and priests, and a versifier himself. But late in his reign—encouraged, we are told, by his bureaucrats—he raised taxes to extortionate rates. Brahmins sat down to die in protest. The king sneered that he wanted to be warned only if “a century of Brahmins, minus one, dies in a single day” (Rajatarangini Book IV verse 633). Ninety-nine Brahmins then drowned themselves in the cold waters of the Chandrabhaga river. Jayapida relented, but only gave up the already tax-free estates of Brahmins, keeping every field seized from his other subjects. According to Kalhana, an angry Brahmin cursed Jayapida, and a pole holding a canopy over the royal head crashed into him, killing him.
Whatever the truth of this account, Kalhana does not mince words about rulers who did not heed the entreaties of his subjects: “For a king of bad conduct there is no other medicine than shunning him.” (Rajatarangini Book IV verse 672). Gen Z’s viral memes about Modi come from a long tradition of anger against sovereign injustice.
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The historical dharna, across northern India
None of this was a Kashmiri eccentricity. The historian Lisa Mitchell’s book Hailing the State (2023) follows the practice from the early modern doorstep to contemporary Hyderabad’s Dharna Chowk. Citing archival research conducted by several scholars in Varanasi, she writes that in the 1700s, public witnessing was the point of dharna, as well as the inconvenience of the debtor. In 1791, the Brahmin widow Bina Bai conducted a dharna in a temple, requesting the right to a share in her late father-in-law’s property. Her brother-in-law only agreed to negotiate after public pressure built up over thirteen days. In other cases, merchants undertook dharnas on debtors’ doorsteps. Brahmins sitting in dharna equipped themselves with weapons or poison, ready to commit suicide if the debtor tried to move them or leave the house. In fact, some British observers suggest that the debtor was also expected to starve during a dharna.
Nearly a thousand kilometres west, in Rajasthan and Kathiawar, this concept took a sharper edge—traga, the threat of self-wounding. There, Charan bards were sacrosanct: spilling their blood was believed to invite a curse, perhaps because bard communities controlled a potential patron’s public image. Some bards turned this into a sort of contract law, standing surety for a caravan’s safety or a loan’s repayment. Anthropologist Jeffrey Snodgrass, in his paper “The Centre Cannot Hold” (2004), describes bards enforcing agreements with a blade held to their own throats.
The underlying logic remained consistent across geographies and centuries. The body was laid down, so that its destruction would fall as a debt or sin on whoever coerced it. The more high-status the body, the greater the outrage, and the greater the consequences for the violator. This might partially explain why it was brutality against Delhi’s Gen Z that struck a national chord, in a way that the government’s handling of many other regional protests and disasters has not.
Also read: Torture, death, fines — how Arthashastra guided ancient kings on addressing crime & dissent
The British and the BJP
The British found dharnas intolerable, insisting that dispute resolution was only to occur through state-approved channels. Sitting dharna was first prohibited in Varanasi in 1793, under East India Company rule. The Bengal Regulation VII of 1820 made it punishable. In 1860 it was written into the then-new Indian Penal Code as Section 508, the offence of coercing a man by working on his fear of divine displeasure. Traga was dismissed by colonial officials—alongside religious practices like hook-swinging—as “barbaric”, and suppressed. These traditions were later revived during the march to Independence and thereafter. The linguistic denomination of South India’s states were catalysed by Potti Sriramulu’s 58-day fast unto death, which saw crowds mobilise across the Andhra coast, met with police firing. There have been several successful hunger strikes since, including Anna Hazare’s 2011 India Against Corruption strike that fed into the BJP’s rise to power.
Pradhan’s dismissal of the dharna on 21 July is part of a larger distaste that the BJP has tried to cultivate, since 2014, against dissent in any shape or form. Yet the self-declared defenders of Hindu civilisation might be better off reading the texts that their ecosystem has been churning into self-help books for business gurus. The Arthashastra of Chanakya—the coldest manual of statecraft the Sanskritic tradition ever produced—issues a warning that the BJP’s Chanakyas might wish to heed.
“By casting away good people and embracing evil people, by initiating unprecedented and unrighteous acts of violence… by not punishing those who ought to be punished, by punishing those who ought not to be punished, by apprehending those who ought not to be apprehended, and by not apprehending those who ought to be apprehended… through the negligence and laziness of the king or the destruction of enterprise and security, there arise the impoverishment, greed, and disloyalty of the subjects… when they are disloyal, they either go over to the enemy or kill their lord themselves. Therefore… he should immediately redress them.” (Book VII, section 5, verses 19–28)
The hatred of one’s own people, Chanakya adds, is deadlier than any disgrace (Book VIII, section 3, verse 16). Translator Patrick Olivelle notes that Chanakya uses the same term, kopa, for both anger and revolt.
Over the last decade, the Indian Right has presented mindless obedience to Modi as akin to civilisational duty, almost equivalent to dharma. A student must only study, a professional must only work, no issue should be ”politicised“ (except, when convenient, religion). But even the ancient Sanskrit authors, so revered today, were clear that even absolute sovereigns owed justice to their subjects: They were to hold the palace gate open, to hear the faster rather than crush them, to hear the petition rather than deploy signal jammers. How much more, then, does a democratically-elected leader owe to the citizens he is supposed to serve?
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)