Introduction to Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023

1. Object and Scope of the BNS

The long title of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita reads as an Act to consolidate and amend the provisions relating to offences and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. Three verbs matter here: consolidate, amend, replace. The Sanhita gathers scattered offences into fewer chapters, updates the law to speak to a digital and networked India, and formally replaces the Indian Penal Code, 1860.

| Key conceptThe BNS is India's substantive criminal law. It defines what conduct is a crime and prescribes the punishment for it. The procedure for investigation and trial lives in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (which replaces the CrPC). Evidence is governed by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (which replaces the Evidence Act). Together these three form the new criminal justice trinity. | | --- |

Object of the Sanhita

• Decolonisation of the criminal law: the drafters aimed to move away from a code written for a subject population to one written for citizens.
• Consolidation and simplification: definitions once scattered across sections 6 to 52 of the IPC are now brought under two provisions, Section 2 (definitions) and Section 3 (general explanations).
• Modernisation: the law now speaks to organised crime, terrorism, mob lynching, deceitful sexual relations, snatching, hit and run, digital documents, and electronic records.
• Victim centred approach: crimes against women and children are pulled forward into Chapter V, and offences affecting the human body into Chapter VI, so that they appear at the front of the code rather than the back.
• Reformative punishment: for the first time in Indian criminal law, community service is a recognised sentence.

Scope of the Sanhita

The Sanhita applies to every person in India for any act or omission that violates its provisions. It also travels with Indian citizens across borders in specified circumstances, and it follows Indian ships and aircraft wherever they may be. The full extra territorial reach is set out in the diagram below and discussed under application.

Fig. Concentric reach of Section 1 of the BNS.

2. A Short History of the Indian Penal Code, 1860

You cannot appreciate a replacement without knowing what was replaced. The story of the IPC is the story of a young British historian, a colony without a uniform criminal law, and a document so well written that it survived for one hundred and sixty three years.

Before the Code

Prior to the IPC, criminal law in British India was a patchwork. Muhammadan criminal law applied in most Presidency towns and was modified from time to time by Regulations of the Company. Different Presidencies followed different rules. Punishments varied. Local customs filled gaps. Justice was uneven, and often unpredictable.

The First Law Commission and Macaulay

The Charter Act of 1833 created the office of the Law Member of the Governor General's Council. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a young man of thirty three who had never practised law but who read Bentham and admired his utilitarian project, was appointed. In 1834 the First Law Commission was constituted with Macaulay as its chairman. The other commissioners, J. M. Macleod, G. W. Anderson and F. Millett, were largely nominal.

Macaulay drafted the code between 1834 and 1837. He submitted the draft to the Governor General in Council on 14 October 1837. His stated aim, in his own words, was to produce a code that was, and he uses these three adjectives that examiners often ask you to quote, concise, perspicuous and complete.

| 📖 Sources of the Macaulay DraftThe IPC drew on English common law (dominant), the Napoleonic Code of France, and Edward Livingston's Code of Louisiana of 1825. Macaulay did not lift indigenous criminal law from Hindu or Islamic sources, though he claimed familiarity with them. The IPC was, in effect, a European document written for India, not an Indian document rediscovered. | | --- |

From draft to statute

The 1837 draft did not become law immediately. It was reviewed by the Second Law Commission under Sir John Romilly and revised further under Sir Barnes Peacock, who would go on to become the first Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court. The Revolt of 1857 delayed matters. After the transfer of power from the Company to the Crown in 1858, the code was taken up again.

The Indian Penal Code was passed on 6 October 1860 as Act 45 of 1860. It came into force on 1 January 1862. Macaulay died in late 1859 and never saw the code operative.

Structure of the IPC

The IPC had 511 sections spread across 23 chapters. It began with a Preamble, moved through general explanations, general exceptions, abetment and conspiracy, then the offences by category (against the state, against public tranquillity, against the human body, against property, and so on), and ended with attempt under Section 511. It was amended over the years, notably after the Nirbhaya case in 2013, but the fundamental architecture that Macaulay set out was never disturbed.

3. Why the IPC Was Replaced

The government's stated reasons cluster into four themes.

**i.**Colonial imprint. The IPC was drafted to serve an imperial government. Provisions such as sedition under Section 124A, and unnatural offences under Section 377, carried the moral vocabulary of Victorian England and were used, in their time, to suppress dissent and criminalise consenting adults.

**ii.**Outdated categories. The IPC did not directly address organised crime, terrorism, mob lynching, cyber offences, identity theft, or the fraudulent use of digital documents. Each of these had to be squeezed into older sections or into special statutes.

**iii.**Victim marginalisation. The scheme of the IPC placed offences against the state and property early in the code and offences against women and children later. The new Sanhita rearranges priority.

**iv.**Overlaps and redundancy. Several IPC sections repeated or nearly repeated one another. Definitions were scattered from Section 6 to Section 52. The Sanhita consolidates and simplifies.

| 🔗 Cross linkCompare with the reasoning in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018), where the Supreme Court read down Section 377 IPC for consenting adults, and Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018), where Section 497 IPC on adultery was struck down. Both decisions foreshadowed what the BNS has now formalised: colonial morality has no place in a modern criminal code. | | --- |

4. Commencement and Application of the BNS

The dates you must know

• Passed by Lok Sabha: 20 December 2023.
• Passed by Rajya Sabha: 21 December 2023.
• Assented to by the President, Droupadi Murmu: 25 December 2023.
• Notified as Act 45 of 2023.
• Commenced across India: 1 July 2024.
• One exception: Section 106(2), which criminalises hit and run by a driver who escapes without reporting to a magistrate or police officer, was kept in abeyance in the face of a nationwide protest by truck and commercial drivers. Its rollout was deferred while consultations continued.

Application within India

Section 1(3) provides that every person shall be liable to punishment under the Sanhita, and not otherwise, for every act or omission contrary to its provisions of which he shall be guilty within India. Read the words every person carefully. Nationality is irrelevant for offences committed within Indian territory. A foreign national who commits theft in Chennai stands trial under the BNS.

| Key conceptThe principle here is the territorial principle: criminal law follows the flag of the land where the offence is committed. It is one of the two limbs of jurisdictional reach in criminal law, and it is the primary one. The other limb, the nationality principle, is where extra territorial application begins. | | --- |

5. Territorial and Extra Territorial Application

Section 1 of the BNS blends territorial jurisdiction (found in Section 1(3)) with extra territorial jurisdiction (found in Sections 1(4) and 1(5)). Learn them limb by limb.

Territorial application, Section 1(3)

Applies to every person for any offence committed within India. This is the standard rule.

Extra territorial application, Section 1(4)

Any person liable under an Indian law to be tried for an offence committed beyond India shall be dealt with under the Sanhita, for any act committed beyond India, as if the act had been committed within India. This sub section imports offences that a separate statute has already declared triable in India.

Extra territorial application, Section 1(5)

This is the operative extra territorial provision. It extends the Sanhita to any offence committed by:

**a.**any citizen of India in any place outside and beyond India;

**b.**any person on any ship or aircraft registered in India, wherever it may be; and

**c.**any person, in any place outside and beyond India, committing an offence targeting a computer resource located in India.

The Explanation makes it clear that offence includes any act committed outside India which, if committed in India, would be punishable under the Sanhita. The statutory illustration is that A, a citizen of India, commits a murder in Uganda. He can be tried and convicted of murder in any place in India in which he may be found. The nationality principle attaches, and Indian courts can try him without any special sanction beyond the Sanhita itself.

| 📖 Mobarik Ali Ahmed v. State of Bombay, AIR 1957 SC 857A Pakistani national in Karachi cheated a person in Bombay through correspondence and telephone. The Supreme Court held that the offence was committed in Bombay because the deception was consumed there. Presence of the accused in India, physically, at the time of the offence, is not required for Indian courts to have jurisdiction. Result: Section 1(3) extends further than a strict physical reading suggests. | | --- | | 📖 Central Bank of India v. Ram Narain, AIR 1955 SC 36The accused, at the time of the offence, was not an Indian citizen. He became a citizen only after Partition. The Supreme Court held that Section 4 IPC (now reflected in Section 1(5)(a) BNS) required him to be a citizen at the time the act was committed. Nationality at the time of trial is not enough. Rule: citizenship must exist when the act is done. | | ✅ Note on the digital extensionSection 1(5)(c) is new in spirit and has no direct IPC ancestor. It captures the foreign hacker attacking an Indian bank server, the phishing site hosted abroad but harvesting Indian users, and the ransomware operator whose payload lands on an Indian computer resource. When answering a question in this area, frame the answer using Section 1(5)(c) and cite Mobarik Ali as authority for the wider principle that the offence is complete where its effect is felt. |

Saving of special and local laws, Section 1(6)

The Sanhita does not affect the provisions of any Act punishing mutiny and desertion by officers, soldiers, sailors or airmen in the service of the Government of India, nor the provisions of any special or local law. Read this alongside the Army Act, the Navy Act, the Air Force Act, and specialised statutes such as the NDPS Act, PMLA, UAPA, and the Prevention of Corruption Act. The Sanhita is general. Special laws are special.

6. BNS vs IPC: An Overview of the Major Changes

The Sanhita is more compact than its predecessor. Where the IPC had 511 sections spread across 23 chapters, the BNS has 358 sections spread across 20 chapters. It introduces new offences, deletes some old ones, updates several, and consolidates a great many.

Structural comparison

| IPC, 1860 | BNS, 2023 | | --- | --- | | 511 sections in 23 chapters | 358 sections in 20 chapters | | Called a Code, in the English tradition | Called a Sanhita, an Indic term for a compendium | | Definitions scattered from Sections 6 to 52 | Definitions collected in Section 2 and general explanations in Section 3 | | Offences against women and children scattered | Consolidated in Chapter V, brought forward in the code | | Attempt punished under a residuary Section 511 | Attempt, abetment and conspiracy grouped in Chapter IV | | Punishments limited to death, imprisonment, forfeiture and fine | Community service added as a form of punishment for six specified offences | | Sedition under Section 124A | Sedition removed as a label; acts endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity punished under Section 152 | | No direct provision for organised crime or terrorism | Organised crime in Section 111, petty organised crime in Section 112, terrorism in Section 113 | | No direct provision for mob lynching | Mob lynching by five or more persons on identity grounds is a distinct aggravated form of murder under Section 103(2) | | Digital and electronic offences dealt with under IT Act only | BNS references electronic and digital records within its offences of cheating, forgery and defamation |

7. Important Provisions Added, Modified and Deleted

New offences added

• Section 111, Organised crime. Covers kidnapping, robbery, extortion, land grabbing, contract killing, economic offences, cyber crime and trafficking in weapons or contraband, committed by a syndicate or in association with others for pecuniary or other advantage.
• Section 112, Petty organised crime. Targets pickpocketing, snatching gangs, unauthorised sale of tickets, cheating by betting or sports fraud, and similar small scale syndicated activity.
• Section 113, Terrorist act. Drafted on the model of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Investigation of a BNS terrorism case, or a UAPA case, is a choice to be made by an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police.
• Section 103(2), Mob lynching. Death or grievous hurt caused by five or more persons acting on grounds of race, caste, community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief or any other similar ground. Punishable with life imprisonment or death. The Supreme Court's earlier guidelines in Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, 2018, are now given statutory teeth.
• Section 69, Sexual intercourse by deceitful means. Criminalises sexual intercourse procured through deceit or false promise of marriage, employment, promotion or by concealing identity. This gives statutory shape to a body of case law that had grown around Section 375 IPC on false promise of marriage.
• Section 106(2), Hit and run causing death, where the driver escapes without reporting. Deferred in force after professional driver protests but part of the Sanhita on paper.
• Section 226, Attempt to commit suicide with intent to compel or restrain a public servant. Section 309 IPC on the general offence of attempted suicide is not carried over, but this narrower conduct is retained as a distinct offence.
• Section 304, Snatching. Grabbing, seizing or removing movable property from a person, treated as distinct from theft or robbery.
• Section 152, Acts endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity of India. Replaces the sedition offence in a more narrowly drafted form.
• Community service as punishment. Recognised for the first time as a sentence for petty offences such as attempted suicide to compel a public servant, minor defamation, misconduct by a drunken person in public, non appearance in response to proclamation, and petty theft under a specified value.

Provisions modified

• Definition of gender. Section 2(10) BNS retains male and female and now includes transgender within its definition. This aligns the criminal statute with the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.
• Definition of movable property. Widened to cover intangibles such as data, thereby making identity theft and skimming of card data prosecutable as theft under Section 303.
• Definition of document. Read together with electronic records for the offences of forgery, cheating and defamation.
• Cheating and forgery. Modernised to include electronic records, digital signatures and impersonation online.
• Culpable homicide and murder. Structure retained from the IPC but renumbered, murder now under Section 103 and culpable homicide under Section 100.
• Rape. Retained substantially with Sections 63 to 73 covering the offence and aggravated forms. Definitions modernised. Marital rape exception continues in its earlier form for a wife not below eighteen years.

Provisions deleted or dropped

• Section 124A IPC, sedition, as a label. Its content survives in a narrower form under Section 152 BNS.
• Section 377 IPC, unnatural offences. Formal removal follows the reading down in Navtej Singh Johar, 2018. Note the residual issue: non consensual carnal intercourse against adult men and transgender persons, and bestiality, are not directly captured by any BNS provision, and this has been criticised as a gap.
• Section 497 IPC, adultery. Formal removal follows Joseph Shine v. Union of India, 2018, though Section 84 BNS retains an offence against a man who entices or takes away the wife of another man for illicit intercourse.
• Section 309 IPC, the general offence of attempted suicide, is not carried into the BNS as a general offence. It survives only in the specific form of Section 226 discussed above.
• Section 310 IPC, thug. An obsolete Victorian survival, deleted.
• Section 444 IPC, lurking house trespass by night, and Section 446 IPC, housebreaking by night, deleted.
• Definitions of Queen, British India, servant of Government of India, and juryman have been dropped, as they carry no continuing meaning in a republican and non jury criminal justice system.