Did Krishna Bend the Rules to Win the War?

We are used to Krishna as the speaker of the Gita — calm, luminous, the very voice of dharma. So it unsettles many readers to notice that in the war itself, again and again, the Pandavas win not by clean fighting but by Krishna's advice to break the rules.

Bhishma falls because a warrior he will not strike is placed before him. Drona lays down his weapons after a half-truth crushes him. Jayadratha is killed in the cover of a false sunset. Karna is shot while unarmed and struggling with a stuck chariot wheel. Duryodhana is felled by a mace blow below the waist, against the code of that duel. In every case, the nudge comes from Krishna.

This is not a small thing to brush past. If the guardian of dharma keeps winning by what looks like cheating, what exactly is dharma? Is it just whatever the winning side did?

The honest answer is more interesting than either 'Krishna can do no wrong' or 'so even God cheats'. These episodes are not there to be excused or condemned. They are there to make us think hard about the difference between following rules and serving justice — and about how easily we confuse the two.

To judge these decisions, you have to remember what came before them. The war did begin with rules — agreed codes about who fights whom, no striking the unarmed, fighting only by day, no attacking from behind. And for a long stretch, the Pandavas honoured them.

The other side did not. The Kauravas had already poisoned Bhima as a boy, tried to burn the brothers alive in a house of lac, cheated them of a kingdom through loaded dice, and dragged Draupadi into court to be disrobed. Then, on the battlefield, came the moment that changed everything: young Abhimanyu, barely more than a boy, was surrounded by six great warriors at once and cut down while unarmed — a flat violation of every rule the elders had sworn to.

Notice what that does. The 'good' side is playing fair against opponents who break each rule the moment it is inconvenient, and shield their worst acts behind the same rules when it suits them. Fair play, against people like that, was not producing justice. It was producing defeat after defeat for the side that had actually been wronged.

That is the soil these later decisions grow in. Not a clean field where Krishna chose mischief over honour, but a war already soaked in the other side's broken vows — where the question had quietly shifted from 'how do we fight nobly?' to 'how does justice survive at all?'

Lay the contested decisions side by side, without softening them.

Bhishma was unbeatable and had vowed never to fight one he saw as a woman. Krishna had Shikhandi placed before him; Bhishma lowered his bow, and Arjuna's arrows brought him down.

Drona could not be stopped while he held weapons. So word was spread that 'Ashwatthama is dead' — true only of an elephant of that name. The grieving father set down his arms, and was killed in that defenceless moment.

Jayadratha was guarded by the whole Kaurava army. Krishna masked the sun to fake dusk; Jayadratha emerged thinking the day's fighting was done, and Arjuna struck.

Karna's chariot wheel sank into the earth and he stepped down, unarmed, asking for the rules to be honoured. Krishna reminded Arjuna of every rule Karna himself had helped break — and told him to shoot.

Duryodhana, in a mace duel, could not be beaten by fair blows. Krishna signalled Bhima to strike his thigh, below the waist, against the code of that fight.

Five times, the same pattern: an opponent who could not be defeated within the rules, brought down by stepping outside them — and each time, the nudge is Krishna's. There is no honest way to read these as accidents.

The lazy reading is that Krishna is simply a clever trickster god — that the whole thing proves even the divine wins by cunning, so cunning must be fine. The opposite lazy reading is that he can never be wrong, so whatever he did was automatically pure. Both let us stop thinking.

The harder fact the Mahabharata keeps pressing is this: dharma and the rulebook are not the same thing. Rules are tools meant to serve justice. When the unjust learn to hide behind those very rules — killing a boy against the code, then demanding the code's protection for themselves — the rules have been turned into a shield for adharma. To keep following them blindly at that point is not nobility. It is helping injustice win, and calling your helplessness virtue.

That is why these episodes target exactly the warriors who had each, personally, abandoned dharma: Bhishma and Drona who sat silent at Draupadi's humiliation, Karna who mocked her and helped trap Abhimanyu, Jayadratha and Duryodhana at the centre of that killing. The rules they now invoked were rules they had already shredded.

Notice the fact does not make the acts comfortable. It just moves the question. The issue was never 'are rules good?' Of course they are. The issue is what you do when the wicked have learned to weaponise good rules against the very people those rules were meant to protect.

Here is where it gets dangerous, and where the Mahabharata is far wiser than a slogan. It would be easy to walk away with 'so the ends justify the means' — to use Krishna as cover for any convenient cheating. That reading is exactly the misuse the text guards against.

Notice what Krishna never does. He never claims these acts were clean. He does not call the false sunset honest, or pretend Karna was fairly killed. He takes the weight onto himself, knowingly, because someone had to act so justice was not erased — and he carries the karma rather than dressing it as righteousness. Even the victorious side ends in grief, not celebration; the Pandavas inherit a graveyard. The text refuses to let anyone feel clean.

That refusal is the safeguard. The lesson is not 'break rules whenever it helps you'. It is almost the reverse: such steps are justified only in the rarest case — when dharma itself is collapsing, when every lawful path has failed, and when you are honest enough to own the wrong rather than rename it good.

Krishna's own words frame why he intervenes at all: 'yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata...dharma-sansthapanarthaya sambhavami yuge yuge' (4.7–4.8) — whenever dharma withers, I come to restore it. The aim is restoration of justice, not personal advantage. The moment you are bending a rule for your own gain and calling it dharma, you have stepped onto Duryodhana's side of the field, not Krishna's.

Why does a four-thousand-year-old set of battlefield decisions still matter to us? Because we live the smaller version of this every day. We meet people who follow the letter of every rule while quietly serving themselves, and people who break a rule to protect someone weaker. We have all hidden behind 'but those are the rules' to avoid doing the harder right thing — and all been tempted to call our own convenience a higher principle.

The Mahabharata does not hand us a clean formula, and that is the point. It refuses both easy exits: neither 'rules are everything' nor 'rules are nothing'. It leaves us standing where Arjuna stood, holding a real and uncomfortable judgement.

The old line from the epic is 'yato dharmas tato jayah' — where there is dharma, there is victory. Read carelessly it sounds like 'winners are righteous'. Read carefully it says the reverse: victory worth having is the one that served justice, not the one that merely obeyed or merely won.

So the question the story hands back to us is sharp and personal. When the rules and the right thing pull apart — and one day they will — which one are we actually serving? And are we honest enough, like Krishna, to own the cost of our choice rather than wrap it in the language of virtue?