The Question Every Court and Classroom Is Arguing About

The IPC vs BNS question faces anyone who has to charge, defend, prosecute, teach or study a criminal offence in India with a practical decision before it becomes an abstract one. Which code supplies the language of the case, and which account of the change between them deserves to be believed? On one side stands the claim that the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 is a reform, a deliberate break with a colonial inheritance. On the other side stands the claim that the Sanhita is principally a renumbering, the Indian Penal Code, 1860 carried forward under a new name with its sections rearranged and its language largely retained. Between those descriptions lies a body of text that can be checked, and checking it is the only way to answer the argument without repeating a slogan.

This article answers that question provision by provision. It does not treat the fall in the number of sections as if that fall were itself a verdict. It follows the two codes through structure and general principles, definitions and general exceptions, offences against the body, offences against women and children, property, offences against the state, new categories with no equivalent in the older code, sentencing policy, punishment types and omissions. At the end it names the deciding factor, the place where change is most systematic and most likely to be felt in outcomes, and defends that identification from the provisions themselves. A reader who disagrees should be able to point to the provision where the reasoning fails.

The stakes are not confined to examination halls. A student who learned that murder was punished under Section 302 of the Penal Code must learn that the punishment now sits in Section 103(1) of the Sanhita, while the definitions of culpable homicide and murder in Sections 299 and 300 sit in Sections 100 and 101. An advocate, a police officer framing a charge and a magistrate deciding what law governs an act committed before the new code commenced all face the same translation problem, and an error can misstate a maximum punishment, miss a mandatory minimum or invoke a provision Parliament omitted. Section 358 of the Sanhita preserves pending investigations, proceedings and liabilities under the Penal Code, and Article 20(1) of the Constitution bars applying new code punishments to acts committed before commencement. Two codes will therefore govern side by side for a considerable period, divided by the date of the act.

That reality explains the heat in the argument. If the Sanhita were only a renumbering, the transition cost imposed on courts, police, prosecutors and students would be difficult to justify. If it is a genuine reform, that cost is the price of a change made in a single operation. The comparison that follows is concerned first with substance, with what the words do.

Why did the government say the Indian Penal Code had to go?

The government said the Indian Penal Code had to go because it was a colonial code drafted to govern a subject population, and Home Minister Amit Shah presented its replacement as decolonisation, shifting the frame from danda, or punishment, to nyaya, or justice, in language, purpose and design.

The government case, stated at its strongest, begins with origin. The Penal Code was enacted on 6 October 1860 and brought into force on 1 January 1862, a product of British rule drafted when the population subject to the code had no share in choosing the legislature that enacted it. Home Minister Amit Shah, moving the replacement bills, presented that origin as more than a historical curiosity. In the account Shah placed before Parliament, a code conceived for the government of subjects carried assumptions about the relationship between state and citizen that an independent republic should not reproduce by inertia, and the vocabulary of the law should announce that the purpose of criminal law is justice rather than punishment inflicted on a subordinated population. The shift from danda to nyaya was offered by Shah as the organising idea of the new codes, and the change of name to Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita was presented as expressing that movement in the title itself.

That case gains force when connected to provisions the government identified with the colonial state. The clearest example, in the presentation made by Shah, was sedition. Section 124A of the Penal Code, inserted in 1870, punished exciting hatred, contempt or disaffection towards the government established by law, and it had long been associated in public argument with protecting a ruling power from its critics. Shah presented the new code as repealing sedition outright, and Section 152 of the Sanhita was described by the government as targeting acts against the nation rather than criticism of a government. Whether that description survives a close reading of Section 152 is examined later in this article. As a statement of the government case, however, it matters that the government presented itself not as amending a troublesome section, but as removing the legal form in which colonial repression had been most recognisable.

The government case also rested on age and accumulation. A code in force since 1862 had been amended in fragments, had absorbed new offences without a general reconsideration of its arrangement, and had scattered related material across places a new reader could find only with familiarity. The definitions were spread across Sections 8 to 52A, rather than gathered in a single provision that could be consulted as a whole. Consolidating that material and gathering related offences into dedicated places could therefore be presented as a service to citizen and practitioner alike. The dedicated chapter on offences against women and children, running from Section 63 to Section 99 of the Sanhita, fits that part of the case, because the arrangement itself announces a legislative judgment about where those offences belong, even where a particular punishment remains unchanged.

The legislative history gives that case its formal shape. The first Bill was introduced in August 2023 and referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, chaired by Brij Lal. It was withdrawn and replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya (Second) Sanhita Bill, which passed the Lok Sabha on 20 December 2023 and the Rajya Sabha on 21 December 2023, received assent on 25 December 2023 as Act 45 of 2023, and commenced on 1 July 2024. The Standing Committee recommended reintroducing an offence covering the surviving uses of Section 377 for non-consensual acts, acts with minors and bestiality, and reinstating adultery in gender-neutral form, and the enacted Sanhita adopted neither recommendation. In the government account, such a text is not a mere reprint.

Set against that account stands the professional counter case, stated fairly. The counter case, advanced in the parliamentary debate by opposition members and commentators, among them senior advocate and Rajya Sabha member Kapil Sibal, is that the drafting is substantially continuous with the code it replaced, and that continuity is the dominant fact a reader finds on opening the Sanhita. Sibal and other speakers directed much of their fire at provisions where the government claimed the sharpest break, arguing in the case of Section 152 that the substance associated with sedition returns in language that is in some respects wider and is accompanied by a heavier alternative sentence. If the most advertised deletion reappears in a new form, the sceptical reader is entitled to ask how many other advertised transformations are movements of language rather than movements of law, and to require anyone claiming a substantive change to show what a court can now do that it could not do before.

The counter case also draws support from the government’s own accounting, as placed before Parliament and summarised by PRS Legislative Research. On the Home Ministry accounting, twenty new offences were added and nineteen provisions of the Penal Code were dropped, imprisonment was increased for thirty-three offences, fines were increased for eighty-three offences, mandatory minimum punishment was introduced for twenty-three offences and community service was introduced for six offences. Those figures describe real change, but they also supply a measure against the size of the whole. A code of 358 sections in twenty chapters, replacing a code of 511 sections in twenty-three chapters, that adds twenty offences and drops nineteen provisions is, on its sponsors own figures, a code in which the great majority of offence definitions were neither added nor removed. The counter case therefore needs only to observe that change is concentrated in particular places, which is inconsistent with describing the whole exercise as a fresh start. A further strand concerned process, since the second bill passed during a session in which 146 opposition members stood suspended, 100 in the Lok Sabha and 46 in the Rajya Sabha. That objection concerns scrutiny, not whether a section changes the law, and the verdict must rest on the enacted text.

What Carried Over: Structure, Definitions and the General Exceptions

The first and largest fact in the comparison is how much architecture carried over without alteration in kind. The Sanhita remains, as the Penal Code was, a single general penal code, one text that defines offences of general application, states the principles by which liability is attributed, sets out defences that excuse or justify conduct otherwise within an offence definition, and then proceeds through families of offences graded by the interest they injure. Parliament could have fragmented the general criminal law into separate statutes, or confined itself to amending the Penal Code in place. It did neither. It enacted a new single code reproducing the organising idea of the old one, and anyone who understood how the Penal Code was arranged understands, in outline, how the Sanhita is arranged, because the outline is the same outline drawn again with fewer and larger compartments.

Within that architecture, the offence families remain recognisable and their grading remains familiar. Homicide is still divided between culpable homicide and murder, with definitions in Sections 100 and 101 of the Sanhita corresponding to Sections 299 and 300 of the Penal Code, and the punishment for murder in Section 103(1) corresponding to Section 302, carrying death or imprisonment for life and fine, unchanged in substance. Hurt is still divided between simple hurt and grievous hurt, theft is still distinguished from robbery and robbery from dacoity, and cheating, mischief, criminal trespass and forgery still occupy the property chapters in forms a practitioner can map onto their predecessors. Additions inside those families, such as snatching in Section 304, are real, but the families themselves and the distinctions by which they grade conduct were retained as the skeleton of the code. That skeleton is early evidence about which kind of exercise Parliament performed, a modernisation of arrangement and sentencing rather than a rethinking of criminal liability from the ground up.

The clearest illustration of the difference between rearrangement and removal is the treatment of definitions, because the same mechanism explains much of the celebrated fall in section numbers. Under the Penal Code, definitions were scattered across Sections 8 to 52A, in which terms used throughout the code were defined one by one in separate sections. Under the Sanhita, that material is consolidated into Section 2, a single section whose sub-clauses carry definitions that previously occupied dozens of numbered places. Nothing about the legal effect of a definition changes merely because it has been moved into a sub-clause rather than left as a section in its own right. A court consults Section 2 instead of the old separate section, and the work the definition does in an offence provision is the same work it did before. Consolidation is a genuine convenience, and it makes the code easier to search, but treating each vanished definition section as an offence abolished would be a plain error of counting.

The same mechanism operates wherever graded families have been merged into single sections with sub-clauses. Theft illustrates the pattern, with the definition in Section 303(1) and the punishment in Section 303(2) doing the work Sections 378 and 379 of the Penal Code did between them. Cheating illustrates it on a larger scale, with Sections 415 to 420 gathered into Section 318, and the punishment for cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property in Section 318(4) carrying a maximum of seven years, as under Section 420 before it. Each merger reduces the headline count of sections without reducing the number of propositions of law the code contains, because the propositions have been repackaged rather than repealed. A shorter code is therefore not automatically a smaller law. Section count measures how drafters chose to divide material, and two codes containing identical propositions can have very different counts if one divides finely and the other coarsely. On that count the Home Ministry figures, twenty offences added against nineteen provisions dropped, describe a body of law of broadly comparable size.

The general exceptions tell the same story of continuity where continuity matters greatly, because the exceptions decide whether conduct that fits an offence definition is criminal at all. In the Penal Code they ran from Section 76 to Section 106. In the Sanhita they run from Section 14 to Section 44, in Chapter III, a relocation that changes where a pleader looks and changes nothing, by itself, about the protection they give. Counsel arguing mistake of fact or private defence will be working with concepts whose structure older case law elaborated over a long period, and transfer into a new numerical home does not wipe that elaboration away. For a fuller account of the older arrangement, readers may consult the complete guide to the Indian Penal Code, which sets out the Penal Code scheme the Sanhita has taken over in this respect. One wording change inside the exceptions deserves attention. The defence the Penal Code framed in Section 84 in terms of unsoundness of mind appears in Section 22 of the Sanhita in terms of mental illness. Whether that substitution alters the scope of the defence will be answered by courts construing Section 22 in actual cases, and a change of wording should be treated as an invitation to examine whether the legal test has moved, not as proof that it has.

The relocation of abetment, criminal conspiracy and attempt completes the picture, and shows the tidiness consolidation can achieve. Abetment, which occupied Sections 107 to 120 of the Penal Code, now occupies Sections 45 to 60 of the Sanhita. Criminal conspiracy, which stood in Sections 120A and 120B, now stands in Section 61. Attempt, which stood at the end of the Penal Code in Section 511, now stands in Section 62, immediately after conspiracy. Placing those doctrines in sequence has intellectual satisfaction, because they are the three principal ways liability extends beyond the person who completes an offence, and a student encountering them together can see they form a family. It remains a satisfaction of arrangement. The doctrines address the same problems as before, instigation and aiding, agreement to commit an offence, and conduct that has passed beyond preparation without reaching completion, and relocation does not expand or contract any of them by a single case.

Common intention supplies a fitting last example, because it is frequently invoked in trials involving several accused and its treatment is characteristic of the whole method. Section 34 of the Penal Code, which made each participant in a criminal act done in furtherance of the common intention of all liable as if the act had been done by that participant alone, appears in the Sanhita as Section 3(5), placed among the opening general provisions. That is arguably a more logical home for a principle of such generality, and practitioners will in time cite Section 3(5) with the same ease with which they cited Section 34. Yet the principle is the same principle, and the body of judgment explaining how common intention may form on the spot, how participation must be proved and how mere presence differs from sharing an intention remains the indispensable guide to its meaning. In the foundations of the code, the Sanhita is the Penal Code reordered, competently and sometimes elegantly, without being reconstructed.

Does renaming a code change how courts read it?

Renaming a code does not by itself change how courts decide cases, because judges construe operative words, punishments and definitions, yet a new name can shape expectations, teaching and public understanding, and retained IPC language carries its accumulated case law into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita unless Parliament changes the text.

The argument that naming is not nothing in a legal culture deserves a fair hearing, because law is also a public language in which a society describes wrongdoing to itself. A statute called a penal code announces punishment as its organising idea, while a statute called a nyaya sanhita announces justice, and asks to be approached and taught in those terms. Home Minister Amit Shah relied on that force when he presented the change from danda to nyaya as the meaning of the exercise, and a thin account of legislation would treat that reliance as merely decorative. Names frame questions. A teacher introducing the Sanhita will be drawn, by the title alone, to ask what a justice-centred code should contain that a punishment-centred code need not, and a legislator defending community service can present that addition as the title made concrete. Community service was added to the list in Section 4 of the Sanhita, in place of the five punishments in Section 53 of the Penal Code, and its Explanation defines it as work a court may order a convict to perform as a punishment that benefits the community without remuneration.

Names also have institutional effects. Citation is a habit, and habits of citation organise libraries, databases, headnotes, syllabuses and the memory of practitioners who must find a provision under time pressure. To rename and renumber a code is to require that apparatus to be rebuilt, and the rebuilding creates a sense of a new beginning that an extensive amendment Act would not create. Supporters of the change are entitled to count that sense as intended, because a legislature may rationally decide that only a new title will dislodge an inherited message. A legal culture reads its history through the titles on its shelf, and changing the titles changes the story it tells about where its law came from and whose it is.

Against that case stands an argument about how courts actually work, and it is the stronger argument where adjudication is concerned. A court deciding whether a conviction can stand does not construe a title. It construes operative words, the definition of the offence, the punishment prescribed and the exceptions that qualify liability, in the light of precedent that interpreted materially identical words in the predecessor code. Where Parliament has re enacted language courts had already interpreted, the ordinary expectation is that the interpretation travels with the language, because the legislature legislates against the settled meaning of words it repeats. That is why retention matters so much here. If definitions consolidated into Section 2, general exceptions in Sections 14 to 44 and common intention in Section 3(5) carry forward the substance of the older provisions, the learning accumulated under Sections 8 to 52A, Sections 76 to 106 and Section 34 remains the learning a court will use, whatever name appears on the cover.

The two arguments are therefore answers to different questions. Naming operates on the culture surrounding the code, on teaching, public expectation and the terms in which future amendments will be proposed, and in that domain a change of name can have consequences unfolding over decades. Construction operates on the outcome of the next case, and in that domain the text governs and the title is at most a marginal aid when operative words are ambiguous. Confusing the domains produces exaggeration on both sides. The government claim is exaggerated when it moves from a new name expressing a new self understanding to a claim that the name has changed the law administered in court, and the sceptical claim is exaggerated when it moves from courts reading retained words as before to a claim that nothing significant has occurred. The remainder of this article returns to the ground on which the dispute can be decided with confidence, what the provisions say.

Offences Against the Body: Continuity with Sharp Additions

The offences against the body are the part of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita where a reader who knows the Indian Penal Code will feel most at home, and that familiarity is itself part of the comparison. The central architecture of homicide law, the distinctions on which trial courts have built charges and sentencing for generations, survives the recodification in recognisable form. Culpable homicide and murder, defined in Sections 299 and 300 of the Penal Code, are defined again in Sections 100 and 101 of the Sanhita, and the punishment for murder, which stood in Section 302 of the old code, stands in Section 103(1) of the new one as death or imprisonment for life, and fine, unchanged in substance. The Sanhita carries the homicide core over almost untouched, preserving the distinction between culpable homicide and murder and preserving the sentencing frame that attaches to murder once the graver label is established. For a practitioner, the work here is relocation rather than relearning, and the interpretive inheritance attached to the old definitions remains the natural starting point.

That continuity makes the one structural repair in this neighbourhood stand out, because it is a repair to a provision whose defect the Supreme Court had identified four decades before the Sanhita was enacted. Section 303 of the Penal Code dealt with murder committed by a person under sentence of imprisonment for life, and it imposed a mandatory death sentence, leaving the sentencing court no discretion to weigh the circumstances of the individual case. In Mithu v State of Punjab in 1983, the Supreme Court struck that provision down, so the mandatory rule ceased to be valid law even though its text remained in the printed code. Section 104 of the Sanhita, which replaces Section 303, codifies the position the judgment had already produced. It restores judicial discretion, providing for death, or imprisonment for life meaning the remainder of natural life. Measured against the living law after Mithu, the Sanhita changes little, since no court could lawfully impose the mandatory sentence the old text described, yet it closes a long-standing gap between text and doctrine. It is not renumbering, because the words now say something materially different, yet the practical reform had been accomplished by litigation long before the recodification gathered it into the text. Culpable homicide, punishable under Section 304 of the Penal Code, is punishable under Section 105 of the Sanhita, preserving the graded relationship between the definition sections and the punishment sections while their numbers move.

The negligence offences are where this part of the map changes in ways that will be felt in ordinary prosecutions, and the contrast with the homicide core is instructive. Causing death by negligence, which Section 304A of the Penal Code punished with a maximum of two years, is dealt with in Section 106(1) of the Sanhita with the maximum imprisonment raised from two years to five years. That is a substantive sentencing change, more than doubling the ceiling available in the run of cases that arise from rash or negligent acts, a category that reaches far beyond murder trials into road deaths, workplace incidents and the everyday fatalities that fill the lower courts. A raised ceiling does not dictate any particular sentence, but it alters the frame within which discretion is exercised and exposes a convicted person to a materially longer term. Anyone asking whether the Sanhita merely renumbers has to reckon with provisions of this kind, because the number on the section is not the only number that changed. Within that same provision, the Sanhita draws a distinction the Penal Code did not draw in this form, and it runs in the opposite direction from the general increase. A registered medical practitioner acting in a medical procedure faces a maximum of two years under Section 106(1), which preserves the old ceiling for that class of defendant while the general ceiling rises around it. The carve out recognises that death arising from a medical procedure presents a different problem of culpability from death arising from negligence at large. The drafting therefore tightens the law for negligence generally while shielding a named professional category from that tightening, and neither half can be described as renumbering.

The second half of Section 106 creates a distinct offence aimed at a specific pattern of conduct on the roads. Section 106(2) is the new hit-and-run clause, providing for imprisonment of up to ten years where the driver escapes without reporting to a police officer or Magistrate soon after the incident. The conduct targeted is not the causing of death alone but the flight that follows it, the decision to leave the scene and withhold the report that would bring assistance and begin an investigation. The commencement notification that brought the Sanhita into force appointed 1 July 2024 for its provisions except sub-section (2) of Section 106, which was excluded and held back. The clause was held back after the transport unions’ protests and after the government assured the All India Motor Transport Congress that it would not be operated without consultation. A provision can therefore be enacted and counted among the code’s changes, yet remain outside the operative law following organised opposition from the sector most directly affected. The episode shows both the targeted offence creation that a simple renumbering exercise would not contain and the political limits of that attempt.

Attempt to murder, which stood in Section 307 of the Penal Code, stands in Section 109 of the Sanhita, and its placement continues the pattern of a stable offence family whose internal order has been rearranged. The survival of the offence in recognisable form means that the case law on intention to kill and on acts sufficiently proximate to the completed crime retains its footing. The Sanhita does not rethink the boundary between preparation, attempt and completion, and does not merge attempt to murder into a general attempt provision. Keeping the specific offence preserves its signalling function, marking the allegation as one of intended killing rather than injury alone.

Hurt and grievous hurt occupy a far larger volume of everyday criminal work than homicide, and here the Sanhita combines familiar ground with two kinds of sharpening, an enhanced fine at the base of the scale and new aggravated tiers above it. Voluntarily causing hurt, punishable under Section 323 of the Penal Code, is punishable under Section 115(2) of the Sanhita, with imprisonment of up to one year unchanged but the maximum fine raised from one thousand rupees to ten thousand rupees. A tenfold increase attracts little attention in debates about the code’s character, yet it alters the practical sentencing palette in the courts that dispose of hurt cases in large numbers, and belongs to the wider pattern of raising fines across many offences. The base offence otherwise keeps its shape. Grievous hurt, punishable under Section 325 of the Penal Code and dealt with in Section 117(2) of the Sanhita, is where the Sanhita builds upward from that inherited base. Section 117(3) adds a new aggravated tier for grievous hurt causing permanent disability or a persistent vegetative state, carrying rigorous imprisonment of at least ten years up to imprisonment for life. The provision identifies the most devastating outcomes short of death and attaches to them a mandatory minimum of a severity the old structure did not impose at this point in the hurt family. Section 117(4) adds a different kind of aggravation, directed not at the outcome alone but at the collective character of the attack. It covers grievous hurt by a group of five or more persons acting on the same listed grounds as the group murder provision, and it carries imprisonment of up to seven years. The two tiers work on different logics. One grades by consequence, treating permanent disability and a persistent vegetative state as harms whose lifelong character justifies a floor of ten years, while the other grades by the collective, identity-based nature of the assault. Together they show the Sanhita legislating in layers over an inherited foundation.

Dowry death offers the clearest counterpoint to those additions, because here the Sanhita changes the number and nothing else of consequence. The offence that stood in Section 304B of the Penal Code stands in Section 80 of the Sanhita, with its punishment of seven years to imprisonment for life unchanged. The offence, its sentencing range included, is carried over as it stood, a reminder that the recodification left some of the most socially charged provisions exactly where it found them in substance, however far they moved in the numbering.

The group murder provision in Section 103(2) is the natural bridge out of the inherited homicide law and into the new categories the Sanhita creates, because it sits inside the murder punishment section while conceptually belonging to a different enterprise. Section 103(2) provides that murder committed by a group of five or more persons acting in concert on grounds of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief or any other similar ground carries death or imprisonment for life, and fine. The underlying act, a killing, was punishable as murder under the Penal Code, and participants in a group killing could be reached through the ordinary law of murder read with the principles of common intention. What the Penal Code did not contain was a named offence that made the group character of the killing and its identity-based grounds part of an aggravated form of murder. The Sanhita supplies that name, responding to pressure for a named offence against collective identity-based killing. The Supreme Court had in 2018 urged a special law against lynching, and Section 103(2), read with the parallel group provision in Section 117(4), answers that pressure inside the general penal code rather than through a separate statute, attaching the code’s highest sentencing range to the new form. It changes what a charge sheet can say about a killing, even where the punishment overlaps with that for murder itself, and it leads directly to the wider question of the Sanhita’s wholly new offences.

Offences Against Property: The Old Families, One New Member

If the offences against the body mix deep continuity with selective sharpening, the offences against property present the continuity case in its strongest form, and an honest comparison should say so before turning to the one genuinely new member of the family. Theft, robbery, dacoity, cheating, mischief, criminal trespass and forgery were mature offence families in the Penal Code, each with its own definition, graded punishments and accumulated case law. The Sanhita preserves those families, gathers their scattered provisions into consolidated sections, renumbers them, and adjusts punishments at particular points. The elements a prosecution must prove survive in substance across most of this part of the map, which is why the renumbering argument, weaker elsewhere, is at its most persuasive here.

Theft illustrates the consolidating method better than any other provision in this family. In the Penal Code, the definition of theft stood in Section 378 and its punishment in Section 379, two sections that had always to be read together. In the Sanhita, Section 303 performs both tasks, with the definition in Section 303(1) and the punishment in Section 303(2), so that the offence and its consequence occupy a single section with sub-clauses. The punishment remains imprisonment of up to three years, as before. The consolidation is characteristic of the drafting technique that reduced the section count, merging related provisions rather than abolishing offences, and it shows why the fall in the number of sections cannot be read as a fall in the number of offences. What has changed around that stable core is the treatment of the repeat offender and of the smallest first offence, two changes pulling in opposite directions. For a second or subsequent conviction, Section 303 provides enhanced rigorous imprisonment of one to five years, so persistence in theft is met with a mandatory floor and a higher ceiling than the ordinary offence carries. At the other end of the scale, the proviso to Section 303(2) introduces community service for a first petty theft, in the case contemplated by the code of a theft below five thousand rupees where the value is returned or restored. The same section therefore hardens the law against the repeat thief and softens its response to the first-time petty thief who makes good the loss. Neither adjustment alters what theft is. Both alter what theft leads to.

Snatching, in Section 304 of the Sanhita, is the one new member of this family, and its creation is best understood as a decision about charging practice rather than as the discovery of previously lawful conduct. Section 304 makes snatching a free-standing offence, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, defined as forcibly or fraudulently seizing movable property. The conduct it describes, the sudden seizure of a chain, a phone or a bag from the person of its owner, was not outside the Penal Code. Depending on the facts alleged, a prosecutor under the old code had to fit the incident into theft, which is built around dishonest taking, or into robbery, which requires the additional elements that elevate theft into one of the gravest property offences. Between those poles lay a pattern of street crime that matched neither label comfortably, since the essence of the conduct is the seizure itself, accomplished by force or fraud in a moment, often without the confrontation a robbery charge contemplates and with a suddenness a theft charge understates. Separating snatching matters in charging practice. It gives the prosecutor a label that describes the incident as witnesses describe it, fixes a punishment of up to three years calibrated to that pattern, and produces records in which the conduct can be seen as itself. The offence does not expand the criminal law over previously untouched conduct. Its effect is taxonomic and practical, a new compartment in an old cabinet.

Above theft and snatching, the familiar ladder of aggravated property offences stands where it always stood, with its numbers changed and its structure intact. Robbery, defined and punished through Sections 390 and 392 of the Penal Code, is dealt with in Section 309 of the Sanhita, and dacoity, which stood in Sections 391 and 395 of the old code, is dealt with in Section 310. The relationship between the two offences, with dacoity as the collective and more serious form of the robbery idea, survives the recodification, as does the position of both offences at the serious end of the property scale. The Sanhita leaves the substance of those distinctions alone. Cheating follows the same consolidating pattern across a wider span of old sections. The Penal Code spread the law of cheating across Sections 415 to 420, separating the definition of the offence from its aggravated punishment form, in which cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property attracted the seven year maximum associated with Section 420. The Sanhita gathers the subject into Section 318, with cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property in Section 318(4) carrying imprisonment of up to seven years, the maximum of the old Section 420 retained. By retaining that figure within the consolidated section, the Sanhita keeps the calibration practice had settled on. The change is in the organisation of the material, not in the liability it imposes.

The remaining members of the family can be taken together, because the same judgment applies to each of them and because their collective weight is what makes this part of the map so favourable to the continuity reading. Mischief, which stood in Sections 425 and 426 of the Penal Code, is dealt with in Section 324 of the Sanhita. Criminal trespass, which stood in Sections 441 and 447, is dealt with in Section 329. Forgery, which stood in Sections 463 and 465, is dealt with in Section 336, and using a forged document, which stood in Section 471, is dealt with in Section 340. In each case the conduct covered and the mental element required remain the inheritance of the Penal Code scheme. Forgery is the most telling example, because its law depends on a chain of connected ideas, the making of a false document and the separate wrong of putting it forward as genuine, and the Sanhita preserves that chain by keeping the making and the using in their own corresponding sections. Criminal trespass likewise retains its structure, in which entry or remaining upon property becomes criminal through the intention or knowledge that accompanies it, and mischief travels into the new code on the same terms. Across these four offences the recodification is relocation and compression, which explains part of the arithmetic of the shorter code.

The assessment that follows from this survey is the one the evidence in this part of the code supports, and it should be stated as plainly as the contrary evidence elsewhere in the comparison. In the offences against property, the Sanhita is at its closest to a renumbering and consolidation of the Penal Code. The families survive with their elements intact, the punishments at the anchor points of the scale, three years for theft and seven years for the aggravated form of cheating, are retained, and the innovations that do appear are located at the edges of the structure rather than at its centre. Community service for the first petty theft, enhanced punishment for the repeat thief and the separation of snatching into its own section are real changes, and a comparison that called this part of the code wholly unchanged would be inaccurate. Yet they are changes to consequences and classification, not to the definition of the wrongs themselves, and they leave the prosecutor proving the same dishonesty, taking, inducement and falsity that the Penal Code required. This part of the map supplies the strongest ground for the claim that the Sanhita reproduces its predecessor, and any defended verdict has to give that ground its full weight before pointing to the changes elsewhere that pull the assessment the other way.

Offences Against Women and Children: A New Chapter, Selective Change

Chapter V of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, running from Section 63 to Section 99, gathers into a single dedicated chapter offences that the Indian Penal Code scattered across its length. Rape, assault and sexual offences against women, cruelty within marriage, dowry death, kidnapping a woman to compel marriage, causing miscarriage, and the sale or purchase of a child for prostitution now sit within one sequence. The gathering makes the code simpler to navigate, and it signals that offences against women and children form a distinct field of the penal law, rather than a collection of provisions that happen to share a class of victim.

What reorganisation does, and what it does not do, has to be kept separate. Reorganisation changes where a provision sits and how readily connected offences can be read together when a complaint is drafted or a charge is framed. It does not, by itself, change the definition of an offence, the burden of proof, the available defences, or the sentence that follows conviction. A section moved without a change in its words remains the same offence carrying the same consequences, and treating a new chapter number as evidence of substantive reform would mistake the architecture of the code for the content of the law. Chapter V therefore has to be read provision by provision, because within its boundaries there are examples of plain continuity, one reorganisation of punishment that is substantive in the fullest sense, and two new offences that test what the criminal law should reach.

Rape is the starting point, and on rape the Sanhita chooses continuity on the points that had attracted sustained argument before the recodification. Section 63 defines rape in correspondence with Section 375 of the Penal Code, and the definition retains both the marital exception and the eighteen-year age line. The marital exception means that sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, where the wife is not under eighteen years of age, remains outside the definition. The eighteen-year line means that the age threshold below which consent does not answer a charge under the definition remains where the Penal Code had placed it. Those retentions are decisions, and a decision to retain is as much a legislative choice as a decision to amend, because Parliament, in enacting a new code, had the opportunity to write the definition differently. Whatever view is taken of the merits, the classification is not in doubt, and Section 63 belongs on the side of the ledger marked as redrafting and renumbering rather than substantive change.

Punishment follows the same pattern. Section 64, corresponding to Section 376 of the Penal Code, preserves a minimum term of ten years extending up to imprisonment for life, unchanged, and continuity here preserves the sentencing practice built around the older provision. The same cannot be said of gang rape, where the Sanhita changes the law in a way that will alter outcomes in the cases to which it applies.

Gang rape, in Section 70, carries the correspondence from Section 376D of the Penal Code, but the punishment for gang rape involving a victim under eighteen has been restructured, and the restructuring is substantive rather than presentational. The Penal Code divided the aggravated offence into two age bands, with Section 376DA addressing a victim under sixteen years of age and Section 376DB addressing a victim under twelve years of age. The Sanhita replaces those two bands with a single category in Section 70, directed at a victim under eighteen, punishable with imprisonment for life meaning the remainder of the convict’s natural life, or death. The change works in two directions at once. The first is simplification, because a single age line replaces graduated bands. The second is an expansion of the most severe punishment band, because victims aged sixteen and seventeen, who fell outside the two special bands in Sections 376DA and 376DB, now fall inside the single category carrying life for the remainder of natural life or death. That second direction is why the provision cannot be described as renumbering. A wider class of cases becomes eligible for that punishment, with a death sentence carried into the wider class, and Section 70 will be experienced in practice as a different sentencing law for a defined group of grave cases.

Sections 74 to 79 carry into the chapter the family of offences the Penal Code placed in Sections 354 to 354D and in Section 509. Section 74 corresponds to Section 354, on assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty. Sections 75 to 78 correspond to Sections 354A to 354D, covering sexual harassment, assault or use of criminal force to a woman with intent to disrobe, voyeurism, and stalking. Section 79 corresponds to Section 509, on a word, gesture, or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman, a provision that in the Penal Code sat at a distance from the Sections 354 family. Other provisions complete the consolidation, among them Section 72, corresponding to Section 228A on disclosure of the identity of a victim of certain sexual offences, Section 87, corresponding to Section 366 on kidnapping a woman to compel her marriage, and Sections 98 and 99, corresponding to Sections 372 and 373 on selling and buying a child for prostitution. The gain in each case is coherence and ease of reference, and the offences arrive as the same offences under new numbers, a consolidation of existing protections rather than a replacement of them.

Cruelty by a husband or his relatives illustrates the same continuity in an area of heavy and contested litigation. Section 498A of the Penal Code is carried into the Sanhita as Section 85, providing imprisonment extending to three years and liability to a fine, read with Section 86, which carries the definition of cruelty. The pair is unchanged in substance, so the Sanhita delivers no new settlement for those who sought reform of the provision and preserves the field as it was for those who valued continuity. Dowry death should be noted by cross reference here. Section 80, corresponding to Section 304B of the Penal Code, places the offence within this chapter, with its punishment extending from seven years to imprisonment for life, unchanged. Its placement aligns it with cruelty in Sections 85 and 86 as part of a single field of marriage-related harm, but the substance remains that of Section 304B and the move is organisational. Where the chapter does break new ground is in two provisions with no direct Penal Code ancestor.

Section 69 creates an offence of sexual intercourse by employing deceitful means, expressly including a false promise of marriage among those means, punishable with imprisonment extending up to ten years, and it sits outside the definition of rape in Section 63. That placement is central to the argument in its favour. Supporters of Section 69 treat it as filling a gap the courts handled awkwardly through rape law. On their argument, a complaint alleging that consent was obtained through a promise of marriage false from the outset had to be framed, if it was to be pursued as a grave sexual offence at all, within the law of rape and the doctrine that consent given under a misconception of fact is not consent, even though the patterns ranged from a promise never intended to be kept to a relationship that had continued for a long period and then ended. Supporters argue that courts were required to draw fine and unstable distinctions between a false promise and a broken promise within rape trials carrying the punishment structure of Section 64, and that a distinct offence with its own maximum of ten years allows the deception to become the focus of the charge, providing a graded and proportionate alternative to rape.

Critics of Section 69 warn, in the strongest version of their case, that the provision criminalises broken relationships and invites the criminal process into the aftermath of intimate life where disappointment, changed intention, and family or social pressure are difficult to separate from deceit practised at the outset. Their objection is not that deception in sexual relations is harmless, but that the central question, what was intended at the moment the promise was made, will in many complaints be reconstructed after a relationship has failed, from messages, recollections, and the fact of the failure itself. Critics argue that a promise genuine when made and later broken because circumstances or feelings changed may be hard to distinguish in a police investigation from a promise false from the beginning, and that the provision may be used as leverage in disputes following a separation, where the burden of a sexual offence investigation is itself severe even if a court eventually finds that deception at inception was not proved. Both sides accept the same text and disagree about how it will operate, so the dispute cannot be resolved from the text alone. What the comparison can record is the nature of the innovation, a new allocation of criminal liability between rape and a lesser deceit-based offence, whose success will depend on whether courts insist on proof that the means were deceitful when they were employed, rather than treating a failed relationship as retrospective evidence of deceit.

Section 95, on hiring, employing, or engaging a child to commit an offence, addresses the use of a child as an instrument rather than an offence against a child as victim in the simpler sense. The Penal Code dealt with offences against children and with abetment as a general principle, but Section 95 names the specific wrong of recruiting a child’s labour and legal vulnerability for criminal purposes, where a child may be chosen because the organiser expects the child’s age to reduce suspicion or shift the immediate risk away from the organiser, while the harm to the child, in entry into offending and exposure to police action, can be severe and lasting. By naming the hiring itself as an offence within this chapter, the Sanhita treats the exploitation as a distinct injury to the child, not merely as a mode of committing the underlying offence. Chapter V, taken as a whole, therefore resists a single label. Its architecture is new, most of its content is retained, its gang rape punishment is substantively widened in severity and reach, and its two new offences are deliberate extensions of the criminal law. A reader who calls the chapter cosmetic ignores Section 70 and Sections 69 and 95. A reader who calls it a transformation ignores Sections 63 and 64, Sections 74 to 79, and Sections 85 and 86, where the older law continues under new numbers with its substance intact.

Offences Against the State: Sedition’s Successor

No provision in the comparison carries as much argument as the succession from Section 124A of the Penal Code to Section 152 of the Sanhita, because whether sedition was abolished or renamed became a test of the government’s larger claim that the Sanhita shed the colonial character of the Penal Code. The argument cannot be conducted without beginning from what Section 124A actually punished. Inserted into the Penal Code in 1870, Section 124A addressed whoever, by words spoken or written, by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brought or attempted to bring into hatred or contempt, or excited or attempted to excite disaffection towards, the government established by law in India. The punishment was imprisonment for life, or imprisonment extending up to three years, or fine. On its face the language was directed at sentiments towards a government, hatred, contempt, and disaffection, and that breadth was the reason the provision acquired its reputation as an instrument capable of reaching criticism and political speech well short of violence, and the reason constitutional litigation fastened on the need to confine it.

The confinement came from the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar in 1962, where the Court upheld Section 124A only by narrowing it to acts involving incitement to violence or a tendency to create public disorder, rather than strong criticism of government measures, however trenchantly expressed. That gloss became the law under which Section 124A lived for the remainder of its life, and a comparison that quotes the text without the gloss misstates the operative law, just as a comparison that quotes the gloss without the text understates the anxiety the unqualified words continued to generate. The final chapter in its life before the Sanhita was the order in S.G. Vombatkere v Union of India on 11 May 2022, where the Court kept the provision in abeyance pending the Union’s reconsideration of it. Abeyance did not strike it down or repeal it, but it suspended the practical operation of sedition. Section 124A therefore arrived at the recodification already narrowed, already suspended, and already identified by the government itself as requiring reconsideration.

Section 152 must be read in full if the succession is to be judged element by element rather than by slogan. The section addresses whoever, purposely or knowingly, by words either spoken or written, by signs, by visual representation, by electronic communication, by use of financial means, or otherwise, excites or attempts to excite secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities, or encourages feelings of separatist activities, or endangers the sovereignty or unity and integrity of India. The punishment is imprisonment for life, or imprisonment extending up to seven years, and liability to a fine. An Explanation protects comments expressing disapprobation of the measures of government with a view to obtaining their alteration by lawful means, where those comments do not excite the activities the section prohibits. Each element differs from Section 124A in a way that can be specified, and the differences point in more than one direction, which is why both the government’s case and the critical case can be made at full strength from the same text.

The first difference is the object protected. Section 124A protected the government established by law, an institution that changes with elections and that democratic speech is entitled to oppose and seek to replace by lawful means. Section 152 protects the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India, and names secession and armed rebellion as activities at its core, an object narrower in its political character and broader in its territorial character. The second difference is the express state of mind, because Section 152 opens with the words purposely or knowingly, making a purposeful or knowing quality part of the prohibited conduct in a way the text of Section 124A did not foreground, and a court giving effect to those words would have material from which to require proof of that purpose or knowledge. The third difference points outward, because Section 152 expressly names electronic communication and the use of financial means, where Section 124A spoke of words, signs, visible representation, or otherwise, and naming them signals that digital circulation and financing are within the legislature’s contemplation. The fourth difference is the sentence, because the alternative term, short of imprisonment for life, rises from a maximum of three years under Section 124A to a maximum of seven years under Section 152, while imprisonment for life is retained in both. The fifth difference is the Explanation, which writes into the section a protection for lawful criticism aimed at altering government measures, framed not as the judicial requirement of incitement to violence or public disorder from Kedar Nath Singh, but as a statutory protection for comments that do not excite the prohibited activities.

The government’s case was put by Home Minister Amit Shah in moving the bills, and its central claim was that sedition was repealed outright. On that presentation, the Sanhita did not carry Section 124A forward under a new number, but removed sedition and enacted a different provision directed at acts against the nation rather than at criticism of a government. The distinction between the nation and the government of the day is the heart of that argument, and it should be given its full force. A government is a temporary holder of office, exposed to opposition as a matter of constitutional design, whereas the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India are not the property of a ministry, and a law directed at secession and armed rebellion is, in the government’s framing, a law of a different kind from a law that punished disaffection towards those in power. Amit Shah placed the change within the wider presentation of the new codes as shedding a colonial, punishment-centred frame described as danda in favour of a justice-centred frame described as nyaya. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs recorded its own reading that the new provision is aimed at acts threatening territorial integrity rather than sentiments about a government, and on that reading the centre of gravity has moved from feeling about a government to acts against territorial integrity, a movement which, if courts honour it, would mark a genuine change in the character of the offence.

The critical case, made in the parliamentary debate by Kapil Sibal, senior advocate and Rajya Sabha member, and by fellow opposition speakers, is that the substance of sedition returns in wider language with a heavier alternative sentence, and that the claim of outright repeal dissolves when the successor text is read closely. Kapil Sibal and fellow opposition speakers directed attention first to the undefined operative phrases, because Section 152 does not define subversive activities, and it does not define what it is to encourage feelings of separatist activities. The word feelings is, on the critical case, a warning sign in a provision said to be concerned only with acts, because Section 124A had also been concerned with the excitement of feelings, namely disaffection, and its capacity to reach speech lay in that concern. They argued that feelings of separatist activities could be invoked at the stage of a complaint in circumstances far removed from secession or armed rebellion, including speech about regional autonomy or grievances against the Union, where the speaker’s purpose was political argument rather than separation, and that subversive activities, without a statutory definition, leaves the boundary of the offence to be supplied by the investigating officer in the first instance and by a court only later, so that the chilling effect of an undefined phrase is not cured by the possibility of eventual acquittal. The second limb depends on the Kedar Nath Singh gloss, because Section 124A had been authoritatively narrowed to incitement to violence or a tendency to create public disorder, and the gloss attached to the old text and does not, on that argument, automatically travel to new words in a new code, so Section 152 begins its life without the settled confinement that had made Section 124A tolerable to the Supreme Court in 1962. The third limb is the sentence, because an alternative maximum rising from three years to seven years is difficult, on the critical case, to reconcile with a narrative of liberalisation. Taken together, the critical case is that Parliament repealed a label, retained a function, widened the operative language in places, and increased the available punishment, so that the new provision can reach further than the glossed old law.

Between those two cases, the Standing Committee’s recorded reading helps locate where the genuine uncertainty lies, because it states the aim on which the government’s presentation also rests, and neither side in the debate treated Section 152 as a provision for punishing disloyal feeling in the abstract. The disagreement is about whether the enacted words are confined to that aim, and about who will do the confining, and at what stage, and with what cost to the person investigated in the meantime. The government case trusts the protected object, the state of mind words, and the Explanation to do the work of confinement within the text. The critical case replies that undefined phrases invite a wider application at the threshold, that the Explanation protects only comments that do not excite the prohibited activities and therefore assumes the answer to the question in dispute, and that a court asked to narrow Section 152 will be construing fresh language without the direct authority of Kedar Nath Singh on that language.

Whether courts will read Section 152 more narrowly or more broadly than sedition, in the glossed form in which sedition operated after Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar, is an open question on which no settled construction exists. Challenges to the new codes are pending, and the provision has not acquired an authoritative interpretation from the Supreme Court fixing the meaning of subversive activities or of feelings of separatist activities, nor has the purposely or knowingly requirement or the Explanation been tested in a judgment determining how much confinement they will bear. A narrower reading is available, built from the protected object of sovereignty, unity, and integrity, from the express mental element, and from the Standing Committee’s recorded understanding that territorial integrity rather than sentiment about a government is the target. A broader reading is also available, built from the undefined breadth of the operative phrases, from the express inclusion of electronic communication and financial means, and from the loss of the automatic protection the Kedar Nath Singh gloss gave to speech under the old number. Which reading prevails will decide whether the succession is remembered as the repeal Amit Shah announced in Parliament or as the continuation Kapil Sibal warned against in debate, and that decision belongs to courts in cases still to be decided.

The New Categories: Offences with No Penal Code Ancestor

The official accounting placed before Parliament recorded twenty new offences in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and among those additions a small group does more than fill a gap in an existing family. Organised crime, petty organised crime, the terrorist act, and murder or grievous hurt committed by a group on specified grounds introduce a different way of describing criminality. The Indian Penal Code was organised principally around acts and their consequences, around killing, hurting, taking, damaging, and deceiving, with liability for participation supplied by general doctrines that attached to the act charged. The new categories shift attention, in part, from the isolated act to the structure, scale, identity, or purpose said to surround it, and that shift is why they deserve separate treatment.

Section 111, which creates organised crime, is the clearest example. The provision is built around continuing unlawful activity carried on by a group or syndicate, and its field includes kidnapping, extortion, land grabbing, and cyber crime. Its centre of gravity is therefore not a single kidnapping or a single demand for money considered on its own terms. It is continuity and organised character. A syndicate, in this framing, is not background detail or a matter going only to sentence after conviction for the underlying acts. It is part of what the prosecution must establish to bring the conduct within Section 111 at all, and the punishment reflects that additional element, running from five years to imprisonment for life, and rising to death or imprisonment for life where death results. The drafting converts association, repetition, and organisation into ingredients of liability in the general penal code.

What Section 111 imports becomes clearer when its earlier home is remembered. Offences framed around syndicates and continuing unlawful activity were previously the territory of special state statutes, enacted for particular conditions and administered as exceptional instruments standing apart from the ordinary law of crimes. Moving that model into the Sanhita changes its reach. A provision in a special statute is invoked deliberately, in a defined setting, and its presence does not alter the ordinary vocabulary of the police station. A provision in the general penal code, by contrast, is available wherever the code applies, is cited alongside theft, hurt, and murder, and enters the standard repertoire from which charges are selected. The Sanhita no longer treats organised criminality as an abnormal subject requiring a separate legislative response in each instance. It treats the syndicate as a regular object of general criminal law.

That transplantation also raises questions of proof. Continuing unlawful activity is a pattern concept, and a pattern has to be shown across time and across acts that may each have their own victims and witnesses. Organisation likewise has to be proved as a fact, not presumed from the circumstance that several persons participated in one offence, or Section 111 would swallow the general principles governing joint liability that the Sanhita retains elsewhere. The overlap with special statutes does not disappear either. The same conduct may fall within Section 111 and within a special enactment, and the existence of two routes makes the choice of charge a substantive decision about the character of the case, the elements to be proved, and the punishment to be sought.

Section 112, on petty organised crime, presses the same logic downward in scale rather than upward in gravity, and it is here that the breadth objection bites hardest. A residual category of that kind can capture ordinary group offending, conduct in which several persons act together without the durability, structure, or enterprise that the language of organisation ordinarily suggests. The objection is not that such offending should go unpunished, since the underlying acts remain offences under the general provisions. It is that the organised crime label does distinct work wherever it is attached, shaping how the accused are described and how the case is understood, and that the label loses its justification when the organisational element becomes thin enough to describe little more than joint participation. On that view, Section 112 risks blurring the line Section 111 depends upon, because if organisation can be found in almost any concerted petty offending, the distinction between organised crime as a special pathology and ordinary crime committed in company begins to dissolve.

Section 113, which defines the terrorist act, makes a comparable transfer from the exceptional to the general, but with a different source. The Sanhita writes into the general penal code, for the first time, a definition adapted from the anti-terror statute, and it provides for death or imprisonment for life where death results. Under the arrangement that preceded the Sanhita, terrorism stood outside the Penal Code altogether, governed by a dedicated statutory regime that marked the subject out as distinct from ordinary crime. Section 113 ends that separation at the level of definition. Conduct described as a terrorist act is now also an offence under the code that governs murder, hurt, theft, and public order, and that is a change in the architecture of the law, quite apart from punishment, because the general code is the statement of what a legal system treats as its standard account of wrongdoing.

The practical consequence is a widening of charging choice. Where the same conduct can be framed under Section 113 and under the anti-terror statute from which the definition was adapted, the prosecution is not choosing between a charge and no charge. It is choosing between two regimes, each with its own statutory setting and history, and the existence of the choice is itself a product of the Sanhita. Dual availability is familiar in criminal law, but terrorism is not a subject on which overlap is neutral, because the framing of a case as a terrorist act carries a public and institutional meaning beyond the elements of the offence. A decision to proceed under the general code rather than under the dedicated regime, or the other way round, will be read as a judgment about the nature of the act. Section 113 thus gives the ordinary code a competing claim over an exceptional category of violence, and leaves to charging practice and judicial construction the task of explaining how that claim relates to the regime beside it.

The group offences in Sections 103(2) and 117(4) move the code in another new direction, toward offences conscious of identity in their definition. Section 103(2) provides that murder by a group of five or more persons acting in concert, on grounds of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief, or any other similar ground, is punishable with death or imprisonment for life, and fine. Section 117(4) applies the same listed grounds to grievous hurt by a group of five or more acting in concert, punishable with imprisonment of up to seven years. What is new is not the underlying violence, which the Penal Code punished without qualification, and not group participation, which the earlier code addressed through general provisions on common intention and the liability attached to an unlawful assembly. What is new is that the ground on which the victim was selected has been written into the offence. In these provisions the Sanhita asks why this victim, and makes the answer, where it is a listed ground, an element defining a distinct and aggravated offence.

That drafting has an expressive dimension connected to its legal effect. A general murder provision treats a killing on grounds of caste or community as murder, fully and severely, but it does not name the ground, and the charge and conviction carry no formal statement that the selection of the victim was itself part of the wrong. Sections 103(2) and 117(4) supply that statement, declaring that group violence directed at a person by reason of a listed ground is a distinct species of harm, injuring the victim and asserting something about the standing of the group to which the victim belongs. The Penal Code had the doctrines to punish the act and every participant. It did not sort killings and grievous injuries by the identity-based ground of the attack, and the Sanhita has chosen to do so. Snatching, which the Sanhita places in its own Section 304, belongs with the property offences and is treated in that part of the comparison rather than here.

Taken together, these categories support a broader assessment, which is that creating a named category is itself a substantive reform even where the conduct was already punishable under another description. Criminal law operates not only through the boundary between lawful and unlawful conduct but also through the charges available, the elements a prosecution must prove, the punishments attached to each route, and the language in which the state describes what has happened. Conduct that could be prosecuted as extortion can be prosecuted, where the statutory conditions are met, as organised crime, and the second description is not the first with a heavier sentence attached as an afterthought. It requires different proof, directs the investigation toward continuity and organisation, and exposes the accused to a different range of punishment. The same is true of the terrorist act brought inside the general code and of group murder defined by its grounds. A comparison that counted only conduct newly made criminal would record these provisions as adding little. A comparison that attends to how offences are constituted records them as among the most genuinely new matter in the Sanhita.

How do the new offence categories change the map of the code?

The new categories add offences defined by organisation, scale and motive rather than by a single act alone, bringing syndicate crime, petty group crime, terrorism and group violence on listed grounds inside the general code, so conduct once handled through special statutes or general liability rules now carries its own named charge and punishment.

The movement described in that answer can be put in terms of the code as a map. The Penal Code mapped wrongdoing primarily by act, arranging its territory around the thing done to a body, to property, to reputation, to the state, or to public order, and supplying general doctrines of participation, abetment, conspiracy, and attempt that could be laid over any part of that territory. The new categories overlay a second map, drawn by actor and by organisation. Under the second map, it matters whether the wrongdoer acted as a syndicate engaged in continuing unlawful activity, whether a group of five or more acted in concert on a listed ground, and whether the purpose behind an act of violence places it within the definition of a terrorist act. Neither map replaces the other, but at the points where they intersect the prosecution must choose which description it will undertake to prove.

The second change is one of location. Subjects once left to special statutes, whether state statutes addressed to organised crime or the dedicated anti-terror regime, have been pulled into the ordinary code that every police station applies. By relocating syndicate crime and the terrorist act into the Sanhita, and by adding group offences defined by their grounds, the legislature normalised subjects that the general code had previously covered only indirectly, or not at all. The map after the Sanhita is therefore not the old map with new numbers. It is the old map with new provinces, drawn according to principles the old map did not use.

The Omissions: What the Sanhita Chose to Leave Out

What the Sanhita added tells only half the story, because the official accounting also recorded nineteen provisions dropped, and the omissions are not all of one kind. Some deletions removed offences that the courts had already emptied or struck down, and in those cases the Sanhita brought the statute book into line with the law as it already stood. Others removed text that still did work, or that a parliamentary committee had advised retaining in some form, and in those cases the omission is a legislative decision with consequences of its own. Section 377 of the Penal Code, the provision on unnatural offences, is the omission the comparison must treat as the consequential one, because it falls squarely in the second class.

The position after Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India, decided in 2018, requires precise statement. The Supreme Court read Section 377 down so as to exclude consensual acts between adults, holding the provision unconstitutional in its application to that conduct. The Court did not strike Section 377 down in its entirety. As read down, the provision survived for non-consensual acts, for acts with minors, and for bestiality, and in that reduced form it supplied an offence covering conduct no other provision of the Penal Code described in the same terms. That surviving residue is the point on which everything else turns. A reader who treated Navtej Singh Johar as having abolished the offence altogether would see the Sanhita as merely completing the judgment, but the judgment did no such thing. It preserved a narrowed offence where consent was absent, impossible, or irrelevant, and the question that followed was what should happen to that narrowed offence when the Penal Code was replaced.

The Sanhita answered that question by providing no equivalent to Section 377 at all, and the result is a protection gap in the cases the Supreme Court had left covered. Non-consensual acts of the kind the read down Section 377 reached, committed against a person outside the protection of the provisions framed around women as victims, lost the offence under which they could be charged, and bestiality likewise ceased to be an offence under the general code. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs saw the point and recommended reintroducing the provision for those surviving uses, so that the narrowed offence would be carried into the new code even as consensual adult conduct remained outside it. The enacted Sanhita did not accept that recommendation, and a part of the criminal law the Supreme Court had deliberately preserved was removed by a legislature choosing, against the advice of its own committee, not to re-enact it.

The matter did not rest with enactment. A petition before the Delhi High Court, Gantavya Gulati v Union of India, sought restoration of protection for non-consensual acts, and the Court called on the Union government to take a decision on the subject. The petition was not a challenge to the decriminalisation Navtej Singh Johar had achieved for consensual adult conduct, and the High Court was not asked to revive the whole of the former Section 377. What was sought was a response to the absence of any offence covering the non-consensual residue, and the Court, rather than supplying the offence itself, directed the question back to the executive whose code had created the absence. The Section 377 omission thus stands apart. It is the one case in which repeal without replacement withdrew a protection the constitutional courts had left intact and a parliamentary committee had advised preserving.

The omission of adultery, formerly Section 497 of the Penal Code, presents the same sequence of judgment, committee recommendation, and legislative refusal, but with the merits arranged the other way. In Joseph Shine v Union of India, decided in 2018, the Supreme Court struck Section 497 down, so there was no operative adultery offence for the new code to carry forward. The Parliamentary Standing Committee nevertheless recommended reinstating adultery in gender-neutral form to protect the sanctity of marriage. P. Chidambaram dissented, writing that adultery is a breach of a compact between two persons in which the State has no business. The enacted Sanhita adopted his position by silence, since it did not reinstate adultery in any form. With adultery, the omission ratified the position the Supreme Court had reached. With Section 377, the omission went beyond the judgment and discarded the part the judgment had preserved. One omission follows the courts. The other departs from them.

The treatment of attempt to commit suicide, formerly Section 309 of the Penal Code, belongs in substance with adultery rather than with Section 377, although the emptying of the offence was accomplished by legislation before it was completed by omission. The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 had intervened through its Section 115, which created a presumption of severe stress in relation to a person who attempts suicide. That presumption emptied Section 309 of most of its force, since a prosecution had to confront a statutory assumption about the condition of the person who made the attempt, and the policy of the law had shifted from punishing the attempt to treating that person as someone in need of care. The Sanhita omitted Section 309 without equivalent, bringing the general code into conformity with a position already established elsewhere in the law. No protection is withdrawn by its absence, because the offence had never protected a victim other than, in the most strained sense, the person who was its accused.

One narrow survivor of Section 309 does, however, remain, and its survival shows that the omission was considered rather than inadvertent. Section 226 of the Sanhita retains an offence of attempting to commit suicide with intent to compel or restrain a public servant in the exercise of lawful power, and community service is among the punishments available for it. What the law has relinquished is the punishment of an attempt as such, where the presumption of severe stress had already made punishment indefensible in policy and impracticable in operation. What it has retained is a public order offence in which an attempt is used as an instrument of coercion against the lawful action of the state, where the wrong is the compulsion or restraint of the public servant rather than the harm threatened to the person himself or herself. The substance, stated exactly, is the deletion of the general offence and the retention, in Section 226, of the one application directed outward at public authority.

Thuggee, dealt with in Sections 310 and 311 of the Penal Code, is the omission at the far end of the scale from Section 377, an offence whose world had vanished long before the Sanhita was drafted. Sections 310 and 311 defined and punished a form of criminal association tied to a historical pattern of offending belonging to an earlier century, and the provisions survived as an archaism, without describing any living category of crime that police or courts needed a special provision to reach. Their omission withdrew no protection any victim relied upon and reversed no judgment. It removed a named offence whose subject matter had ceased to exist as a distinct phenomenon, leaving actual killing, robbery, or criminal association to the general provisions governing such conduct.

The omissions, read as a group, therefore divide along a line a fair comparison should draw explicitly. Adultery and the general offence of attempt to commit suicide ratified what had already been done, the first by the Supreme Court in Joseph Shine and the second principally by Parliament itself in the Mental Healthcare Act, and thuggee recognised an offence that had outlived the world that produced it. In those cases the Sanhita followed a change made elsewhere or a change in conditions, and the deletion altered the appearance of the statute book more than the substance of the law. Section 377 was different in kind. There, the Supreme Court had drawn a line between consensual adult conduct, which it removed from the offence, and non-consensual acts, acts with minors, and bestiality, which it left within it, and the Standing Committee had advised honouring that line. The Sanhita instead omitted the provision whole, creating a genuine gap the Delhi High Court has since called upon the Union to address. Deletion in a recodification is sometimes housekeeping, sometimes obedience to the courts, and sometimes the discarding of dead law. In the Section 377 case it was none of those things, but a choice to leave unprotected conduct that every institution examining the question before enactment had treated as conduct the criminal law should continue to reach.

Sentencing Policy: Where the Sanhita Actually Bites

Whether the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita changes India is not best decided by counting sections or comparing chapter headings. Those inquiries show much continuity, but they look for change where a penal code does little of its daily work. A penal code governs lives where a court, having found an offence proved, decides what follows for the person convicted. It governs them earlier too, because every charge is framed, every plea weighed, and every negotiation conducted in the shadow of the attached punishment. Sentencing policy is therefore not an appendix to this comparison. It is the ground on which it must be decided. A legislature that leaves an offence definition untouched but raises its fine, increases its maximum, removes the power to go below a floor, or adds a punishment that did not exist before has not merely relabelled the law. It has changed what the law does to people, in the class of cases that reaches the courts in the greatest numbers.

Section 53 of the Penal Code listed five punishments. Section 4 of the Sanhita lists six, adding community service, and the addition sits among the opening provisions rather than inside a single offence. That placement matters. A punishment named in the general provision is a recognised form of state response, distinct from imprisonment and from a fine, and a court imposing it is not improvising an informal condition. Readers who want the Sanhita itself set out in full can consult the explained guide to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for what the code contains chapter by chapter. Section 4 also defines the term. Its Explanation describes community service as work a court may order a convict to perform as a form of punishment that benefits the community, for which the convict is not entitled to any remuneration. Each element carries weight. The work is ordered by a court, so it is a judicial act. It is performed as punishment, so it is not charity or rehabilitation offered instead of a sentence. It must benefit the community, so its justification rests on a visible public return. It is unpaid, so it cannot become ordinary employment or be bought out through the value of the labour.

A sixth punishment is structural even if used sparingly. The list of punishments sets the vocabulary in which sentencers think. Under the Penal Code, a court wishing to mark an offence without imprisonment had narrow tools, centred on the fine, and the fine is blunt for that purpose. It falls very differently on a person of means and on a person without them, it can be paid by someone other than the offender, and unpaid it can lead to imprisonment in default, so an attempt to avoid custody ends in custody for poverty rather than for the offence. Community service occupies different ground. It exacts time and effort rather than money, it is personal to the offender, and it leaves the offender in work and family life while still recording that a court has punished and not merely warned. Even where it is not imposed, its presence in Section 4 changes the reasoning expected of a court, because a sentencer who imprisons a petty offender does so having passed over an alternative the code places on the same list as imprisonment. To put community service in the general punishment section is to state that unpaid work for the community is a normal part of Indian sentencing, not an experiment attached to one offence and liable to be forgotten there.

The most consequential change, however, is mandatory minimum punishment, introduced for twenty-three offences on the Home Ministry accounting placed before Parliament and summarised by PRS Legislative Research. A mandatory minimum is a floor written into the offence provision. Where the Penal Code commonly fixed a maximum and left the court free to impose anything below it suited to the facts, a minimum withdraws the lower part of the range altogether. The judge who has heard the evidence and concluded that the case calls for less is not permitted to act on that conclusion. Discretion does not disappear. It is displaced, from the judge, who exercises it openly with reasons recorded, to the investigator and prosecutor, who exercise it earlier, in private, and with far less obligation to explain. The offence chosen for the charge sheet determines the floor, so the decisive sentencing decision is in substance taken when the charge is chosen, before a court has heard a witness.

That displacement shapes plea decisions and charge selection throughout the system. An accused weighing whether to contest a charge weighs the sentence conviction will compel as well as the likelihood of conviction, and a high minimum raises the cost of losing so sharply that pressure to accept a lesser charge, or to seek one carrying no minimum, becomes central to the defence calculation. For the prosecution, where two provisions might cover the same conduct and only one carries a minimum, the choice between them is also a choice about bargaining leverage and about the range within which any negotiated outcome can fall. None of this requires bad faith. It is the predictable working of a floor where participants act on the incentives the law gives them, and it means a minimum does much of its work in charge sheets and plea discussions, without ever being pronounced in court.

The strongest case for minimums, and the deterrent case the government made for the Sanhita, rests on consistency and signalling. Sentencing under a wholly discretionary system can vary sharply between courts faced with similar facts. Two offenders who have done the same thing in different districts may receive very different punishments, feeding a suspicion that outcomes depend on the court, the counsel or the connections available rather than on gravity. A floor answers that suspicion. It guarantees that an offence the legislature regards as grave will never attract a token sentence, and it assures victims and the public, in advance and for everyone, that a stated level of wrongdoing attracts at least a stated consequence. Signalling is connected. A raised maximum may be ignored, because a maximum courts seldom approach can drift into irrelevance, but a minimum cannot be missed by police, prosecutors, courts or potential offenders. It tells them Parliament has placed the offence in a more serious category, and the government presented the sentencing changes in that spirit, as making consequences more certain. Certainty, on this view, deters more reliably than severity threatened at a distance, and a floor is the most direct way to supply it.

The strongest case against, pressed in the sentencing discretion critique made during the parliamentary debate, begins from the same facts and reaches the opposite conclusion. No two cases sharing an offence label are identical in gravity. Within any class of conduct there are marginal instances far less culpable than the paradigm the legislature had in mind, because of a minor role, age, coercion, mental condition, provocation, or a prompt attempt to make amends. A judge sits precisely to make those distinctions, on evidence, after hearing both sides. A minimum instructs the judge to disregard them where they matter most, so sentencing is driven by the charge rather than by the facts. The provision the prosecution selects on the papers at an early stage fixes the least that can happen, while the facts emerging at trial can only push the sentence upward. On this view, disparity is not removed but relocated to a less visible and less accountable place, since similar offenders charged under different provisions may receive markedly different sentences for reasons that never appear in a judgment. Consistency may also erode over time, because courts and prosecutors who repeatedly face floors they regard as unjust in the case before them will find ways around them, through charge selection, acquittal on the graver count, or a narrowing reading of the provision, each introducing a new unrecorded variation. The two arguments cannot both be satisfied. A floor buys certainty at the price of individual fit, and in adopting minimums for twenty-three offences the Sanhita has chosen certainty as the governing value. That is a policy decision about how Indian sentencing should work, and it is not cosmetic.

The Sanhita also raises imprisonment for thirty-three offences and fines for eighty-three, on the same accounting. The totals alone say little about which offences were chosen or how far they moved, and the concrete instances show the pattern better. Death by negligence under Section 304A of the Penal Code carried up to two years. Under Section 106(1) of the Sanhita it carries up to five. That multiplies the maximum for an offence arising from ordinary life, from driving, from building sites and factories, and from the many settings where a failure of care has irreversible consequences. The same provision draws a line inside the increase, because a registered medical practitioner acting in a medical procedure faces a maximum of two years, the figure the Penal Code applied to everyone. It separates the professional whose negligence occurs in treatment undertaken to help the patient from the general run of negligent killing, holding the older ceiling for one class while raising it for the other. A renumbering exercise has no occasion to make such a distinction.

Fines repay equal attention, because they are the punishment most often imposed and least often discussed. For voluntarily causing hurt, Section 323 of the Penal Code allowed a fine of up to one thousand rupees alongside imprisonment of up to one year. Section 115(2) of the Sanhita leaves imprisonment at up to one year and raises the maximum fine to ten thousand rupees. A tenfold rise recognises, in figures, that a maximum fixed in an earlier monetary world had ceased to function as punishment. One thousand rupees cannot mark the gravity of an assault for most offenders, and a fine that does not bite neither deters nor condemns. Raising the ceiling obliges no court to impose the new maximum. It restores a discretion inflation had quietly removed, for an offence that fills the lower courts rather than one that dominates public argument. Across the eighty-three increases, the significance lies in the legislature working through the code offence by offence to recalibrate monetary penalties, unglamorous lawmaking that alters the practical sentence in a large number of routine prosecutions.

Other increases protect public authority and public order. Disobedience to an order duly promulgated by a public servant, Section 188 of the Penal Code, appears as Section 223 of the Sanhita with its punishments raised. Such orders are the instrument by which authorities restrict movement, control assemblies, close premises or direct action in an emergency, and raising the punishment strengthens the administration at the point of enforcement. Theft shows a related logic aimed at repetition. Section 303 keeps the basic punishment at up to three years, as before, but for a second or subsequent conviction prescribes enhanced rigorous imprisonment of one to five years. The first offence is treated much as before. The returning offender enters a harder regime, with a floor, a higher ceiling and the sentence specified as rigorous. Persistence after conviction is treated as a graver fact about the offender, distinct from the value taken, and the added severity is reserved for it.

Read together, the increases cluster on public order, negligence and repeat offending rather than on the gravest crimes. That is partly arithmetic. Murder under Section 103(1), following Section 302 of the Penal Code, carries death or imprisonment for life and a fine, and no punishment can be raised beyond that point. Rape under Section 64 carries a minimum of ten years extending to imprisonment for life, as under the Penal Code, and dowry death under Section 80 carries seven years to imprisonment for life, unchanged. Where the top of the scale is occupied, an increase is impossible, so a reform working through increases must do its work lower down. But the clustering is also a judgment about where the older code was most out of alignment. Negligence that kills was treated as a minor lapse, fines had been left at sums bearing no relation to a real burden, disobedience to lawful orders was priced low, and the repeat offender faced much the same treatment on a third conviction as on a first. The increases concentrate on offences that occur in volume and arise from everyday conduct, shaping how most people experience the criminal law as road users, neighbours, employees, traders and residents subject to public orders. Changing sentencing there changes the working character of the code, though the definitions of murder, rape and robbery read much as before.

Community service fits the same pattern, and its chosen offences are the clearest clue to the philosophy behind it. It is available for six offences, being a public servant unlawfully engaging in trade under Section 202, non-appearance in response to a proclamation under Section 209, attempt to commit suicide to compel or restrain a public servant under Section 226, a first petty theft below five thousand rupees where the value is returned or restored under the proviso to Section 303(2), misconduct in public by a drunken person under Section 355, and defamation under Section 356(2). The common features are hard to miss. None is an offence of serious violence, grave injury, sexual wrongdoing or large-scale dishonesty. Several concern public administration or public decency rather than an individual victim’s body or property. The petty theft is confined by a low threshold and by the condition that the value be returned or restored, so the offender who has made the victim whole is the person contemplated. Defamation protects reputation, which imprisonment vindicates clumsily and visible service may mark more proportionately. Section 226 survives only where an attempt at suicide is used as an instrument against a public servant, and there community service recognises that custody is an unlikely answer to self-harm undertaken as protest or pressure.

The six reveal a deliberate policy of diverting petty, non-violent offending out of prison. Imprisonment is the most expensive response the State possesses. It removes the offender from work and dependants, exposes a first offender to more experienced offenders, and consumes places in institutions whose conditions are a standing subject of judicial concern. For an offence adequately marked by unpaid community work, prison purchases no added public protection, because the offender was not dangerous, and no added vindication, because in several of these cases there is no individual victim seeking it. Diversion is not leniency. Community service is punishment imposed after conviction, it takes time under compulsion, and it publicly acknowledges that the law was broken. Given a new punishment to distribute, the legislature distributed it downwards, to the bottom of the scale of gravity, rather than to middling offences where it might have been a convenient middle option. In the same code that multiplies the maximum for negligent killing and a hurt fine by ten, an exit from custody was built for the drunken person who misbehaves in public and the first-time thief who steals little and gives it back.

Against that background, the death penalty must be stated plainly. It is retained, and it is not left as an inherited survival confined to its old offences, because it attaches to some new offences, including a terrorist act causing death under Section 113 and group murder under Section 103(2). A legislature deciding to move away from capital punishment had a complete recodification in which to do so, or at least to restrict its reach. The Sanhita instead carries it forward and extends it. Under Section 103(2), murder by a group of five or more persons acting in concert on grounds of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief or any other similar ground carries death or imprisonment for life and a fine. That offence had no Penal Code counterpart, so the legislature was writing on a clean page, and it put death at the head of the punishment.

The tension with the code’s presentation is real. The government presented the new codes, through Home Minister Amit Shah, as shedding a colonial, punishment-centred frame, described as danda, for a justice-centred frame, described as nyaya. Such a shift might be expected to reduce reliance on the State’s most punitive instruments and emphasise restitution and repair, and parts of the Sanhita answer that expectation, community service among them, as does the petty theft proviso conditioned on return or restoration. Retention and extension of the death penalty answer in the opposite direction, as do minimums withdrawing mitigation and increases multiplying maxima for ordinary negligence. The Sanhita therefore embodies two sentencing philosophies side by side. For petty, non-violent offending it moves towards diversion and punishment served in the community. For offending treated as threatening public order, collective security or social cohesion it moves towards severity, longer terms, higher fines and floors below which no court may go. The second movement is likely to be felt more widely, because minimums and raised maxima apply across twenty-three and thirty-three offences, while community service is attached to six.

That is the ground on which the verdict of this comparison rests. Roughly three quarters of the Penal Code’s offence law reaches the Sanhita as renumbering or redrafting without substantive change, a genuine measure of continuity in what the law forbids. But forbidding is only half of what a penal code does. The other half is deciding what happens to those who are caught, charged and convicted, and there the Sanhita has acted systematically, adding a punishment, withdrawing discretion at the bottom of the range for twenty-three offences, raising imprisonment for thirty-three and fines for eighty-three, concentrating increases on negligence, public order and repetition, extending the death penalty to new offences, and opening a route out of custody for a small, carefully chosen class of petty offenders. Those changes operate in the cases that fill the courts, not the celebrated trials of the gravest crimes but the daily run of hurt, theft, disobedience, negligence and public disorder, where a fine, a short term, a floor or a community service order is the whole practical content of the criminal law for everyone involved. Outcomes there are set at sentencing, by the ceilings, floors and options the code supplies, not by the number of the section in the charge. A code can keep three quarters of its predecessor’s offence law and still change outcomes across the system, because it has rewritten the part of the law that determines what a conviction costs. That, not the new names on the cover, is where the Sanhita actually bites.

The IPC to BNS Translation and Change Table

The table below is the working core of this comparison. Each row takes a provision or a family of provisions of the Indian Penal Code, gives the corresponding place in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and classifies the change using a fixed set of five descriptions. Renumbered only means the provision moved and nothing else of substance happened to it. Redrafted without substantive change means the words were reorganised, consolidated or modernised while the liability they impose stayed the same. Substantively changed means the offence, its ingredients or its punishment structure is different in a way that can affect a case. Newly created means the Sanhita contains an offence with no Penal Code source. Omitted without replacement means a Penal Code provision disappeared and nothing took its place. The classification, not the numbering, is the argument of this article in compressed form, and the verdict at the end is drawn from counting these rows.

Indian Penal Code provision	Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita provision	Classification
Sections 8 to 52A, definitions scattered through the code	Section 2, definitions consolidated in one section	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 53, the five punishments	Section 4, six punishments including community service	Substantively changed
Section 34, common intention	Section 3(5)	Renumbered only
Sections 76 to 106, general exceptions	Sections 14 to 44, Chapter III	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 84, unsoundness of mind	Section 22, mental illness	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 107 to 120, abetment	Sections 45 to 60	Renumbered only
Sections 120A and 120B, criminal conspiracy	Section 61	Renumbered only
Section 511, attempt to commit offences	Section 62	Renumbered only
Section 121, waging war against the Government of India	Section 147	Renumbered only
Section 124A, sedition	Section 152, acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India	Substantively changed
Sections 141 to 149, unlawful assembly and rioting	Sections 189 to 191	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 153A, promoting enmity between groups	Section 196	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 295A, outraging religious feelings	Section 299	Renumbered only
No equivalent	Section 111, organised crime	Newly created
No equivalent	Section 112, petty organised crime	Newly created
No equivalent	Section 113, terrorist act	Newly created
Sections 299 and 300, culpable homicide and murder defined	Sections 100 and 101	Renumbered only
Section 302, punishment for murder	Section 103(1)	Renumbered only
No equivalent	Section 103(2), murder by a group of five or more on listed grounds	Newly created
Section 303, murder by a life convict, mandatory death sentence	Section 104, death or imprisonment for life at the court’s discretion	Substantively changed
Section 304, punishment for culpable homicide	Section 105	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 304A, causing death by negligence	Section 106(1), maximum raised from two years to five	Substantively changed
No equivalent	Section 106(2), causing death by rash or negligent driving and escaping without reporting	Newly created
Section 307, attempt to murder	Section 109	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 308, attempt to commit culpable homicide	Section 110	Renumbered only
Section 306, abetment of suicide	Section 108	Renumbered only
Section 309, attempt to commit suicide	No equivalent, apart from the narrow offence in Section 226	Omitted without replacement
Sections 310 and 311, thuggee	No equivalent	Omitted without replacement
Section 312, causing miscarriage	Section 88	Renumbered only
Section 304B, dowry death	Section 80	Renumbered only
Section 323, voluntarily causing hurt	Section 115(2), maximum fine raised from one thousand rupees to ten thousand rupees	Substantively changed
Section 325, voluntarily causing grievous hurt	Section 117, with new aggravated tiers in Sections 117(3) and 117(4)	Substantively changed
Section 326, grievous hurt by dangerous weapons	Section 118	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 336 to 338, acts endangering life or personal safety	Section 125	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 375, rape defined	Section 63	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 376, punishment for rape	Section 64	Renumbered only
Section 376D, gang rape, with Sections 376DA and 376DB	Section 70, with a single under-eighteen category in Section 70(2)	Substantively changed
Section 354, assault on a woman to outrage her modesty	Section 74	Renumbered only
Sections 354A to 354D, sexual harassment, disrobing, voyeurism, stalking	Sections 75 to 78	Renumbered only
Section 366, kidnapping a woman to compel marriage	Section 87	Renumbered only
Sections 372 and 373, selling or buying a child for prostitution	Sections 98 and 99	Renumbered only
Section 498A, cruelty by husband or relatives	Sections 85 and 86, punishment and definition separated	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 509, insulting the modesty of a woman	Section 79	Renumbered only
Section 228A, disclosure of a victim’s identity	Section 72	Redrafted without substantive change
No equivalent	Section 69, sexual intercourse by deceitful means	Newly created
No equivalent	Section 95, hiring or engaging a child to commit an offence	Newly created
Sections 378 and 379, theft	Section 303, with enhanced punishment for repeat conviction and a community service proviso	Substantively changed
No equivalent	Section 304, snatching	Newly created
Sections 390 and 392, robbery	Section 309	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 391 and 395, dacoity	Section 310	Renumbered only
Sections 415 to 420, cheating	Section 318	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 425 and 426, mischief	Section 324	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 441 and 447, criminal trespass	Section 329	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 463 and 465, forgery	Section 336	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 471, using a forged document as genuine	Section 340	Renumbered only
Sections 499 and 500, defamation	Section 356, with community service added in Section 356(2)	Substantively changed
Section 268, public nuisance, with Section 290	Sections 270 and 292	Redrafted without substantive change
Sections 269 and 270, negligent acts spreading infection	Sections 271 and 272	Renumbered only
Section 279, rash driving	Section 281	Redrafted without substantive change
Section 186, obstructing a public servant	Section 221	Renumbered only
Section 188, disobedience to an order of a public servant	Section 223, punishments raised	Substantively changed
Section 171E, bribery at elections	Section 173	Renumbered only
Section 377, unnatural offences	No equivalent; the protection gap the omission leaves is traced in the article on the Navtej Singh Johar judgment	Omitted without replacement
Section 497, adultery	No equivalent	Omitted without replacement

Two Codes Running in Parallel: Savings, Transition and the Cost of Changing Everything at Once

A comparison of texts can make the replacement of the Penal Code sound like an event completed on a single day. In practice it is a process measured in years, because the Sanhita governs acts committed on or after its commencement on 1 July 2024, while the Penal Code continues to govern everything done before that date. Section 358 of the Sanhita, its repeal and savings provision, repeals the Penal Code while preserving pending investigations, proceedings and liabilities under it, and Article 20(1) of the Constitution supplies an independent guarantee, since no person may be subjected to a penalty greater than the one the law in force at the time of the act provided. The consequence is that the two codes run in parallel, divided by the date of the alleged act, and they will do so for as long as prosecutions for pre-commencement conduct work their way through the courts, which in a system carrying long trial queues means a considerable period.

What happens to a trial that began under the Indian Penal Code?

A trial that began under the Indian Penal Code continues under the Indian Penal Code, because Section 358 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita saves pending investigations, proceedings and liabilities from the repeal, and the offence, its punishment and the defences available are those of the code in force when the act was committed.

That answer has a working life far beyond the trial itself. An investigation opened under the Penal Code keeps its numbering through the charge sheet, the framing of charges, the appeal and any revision, and a first information report registered for an old act after commencement still charges the Penal Code offence, because the date of the act, not the date of the report, selects the code. Lawyers have to work with both codes at once, citing the Sanhita for new conduct and the Penal Code for old, and keeping the correspondence between them straight in the same week’s filings. The procedural half of the same discipline sits in the companion code, and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita carries the savings and procedure rules that decide how those older cases continue to move. None of this is an argument against replacement. It is the ordinary price of replacing a code rather than amending it, and it falls due in every courtroom where a pre-commencement case is still being heard.

Precedent crosses the divide more easily than procedure does. Where the Sanhita re-enacts the words of the Penal Code, courts approach the repeated words with the meaning earlier judgments had settled, because a legislature that repeats interpreted language is taken to legislate against the interpretation it found. The enormous body of Penal Code case law on culpable homicide, common intention, dishonest intention in theft and cheating, and the general exceptions therefore remains the working library for the corresponding Sanhita provisions, and the translation table in this article is, among other things, a map of which parts of that library shelve where. The caution runs the other way where the text changed. The gloss that Kedar Nath Singh placed on Section 124A attached to words Parliament did not repeat, and Section 152 begins its life to be construed on its own terms, which is why the sedition succession was framed earlier in this article as an open question rather than a settled continuity.

The practical criticism of the replacement deserves separate statement, because it is the criticism felt most widely and held with the least ideology. Parliament replaced not one code but three at a stroke: the Penal Code by the Sanhita, the Code of Criminal Procedure by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and the Indian Evidence Act by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, all commencing together. Every police officer framing a charge, every prosecutor settling a charge sheet, every magistrate and sessions judge, every defence lawyer, and every law student and teacher had to change the numbering of substantive law, procedure and evidence in the same season. The criticism made by practitioners and teachers, in the debate around commencement and in professional commentary, is that a phased replacement, one code at a time, would have spread that cost and allowed the errors of the first transition to be corrected before the second began, at the price of a longer period in which old and new provisions cross-referred. The government’s answer, in substance, was that the three codes interlock, that procedure and evidence provisions cite the substantive code throughout, and that replacing them together avoided years of mismatch between codes drafted in different centuries. Both points are genuinely held, and the honest assessment is that the interlocking argument is strong on paper while the burden argument is strong in the district court corridor, where a wrong section number in a charge sheet costs an adjournment and, occasionally, a discharge application. Journalists covering the first prosecutions under the new codes sit inside the same transition, maintaining notes and source material across two numbering systems at once, which is one reason the methods described in the account of how journalists use VaultBook to protect sources speak to anyone keeping sensitive case material through a change of this scale. What can be said without taking sides is that the transition cost is transitional by nature. It is paid once, in the years after commencement, and it does not decide the character of the code that remains when the payment is done. That character has to be judged on the provisions, which is the work the preceding sections and the table have done.

One limit on everything said here should be recorded plainly. This article states the general position of two codes across the whole field of offences, and the general position does not substitute for advice on an individual case, where the date of the act, the savings provisions and the exact correspondence between provisions have to be applied to particular facts, and where limitation and forum rules are unforgiving of delay.

The Verdict: A Sentencing Statute in the Clothes of a Recodification

Where does the three-quarters figure in this article come from?

The figure comes from counting the rows of the translation table in this article: of the fifty-six Penal Code provisions or provision groups mapped there, forty-two reach the Sanhita as renumbering only or redrafting without substantive change, which is three in four, stated as an approximation of the whole code from that sample.

The full count repays attention, because it disciplines both slogans at once. Alongside the forty-two carried-over rows, the table records ten provisions substantively changed, four omitted without replacement, and eight rows that are new creations with no Penal Code source, sixty-four rows in all. The sample is not the whole code, and it was chosen for significance rather than at random, so three-quarters is an estimate with a method rather than a measurement of every section. But it is the kind of estimate either side of the argument must now engage with, because it locates the continuity and the change in named provisions instead of in impressions formed from the length of the two books.

On that evidence, the verdict of this comparison is as follows. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita is not a genuine reform of the offence law of India, if reform means rethinking what conduct is criminal and how liability for it is constructed, because roughly three-quarters of that law arrives unchanged in substance, including the architecture of homicide, the main property families, the definition of rape, the cruelty provision and the general exceptions. Nor is it a mere renumbering exercise, because the quarter that changed is not scattered at random. It is concentrated in sentencing policy, where the change is systematic: a sixth punishment created, mandatory minimums imposed across twenty-three offences, imprisonment raised for thirty-three, fines for eighty-three, the death penalty carried into new offences, and a diversion out of custody built for six petty ones. The deciding factor, the thing that will determine what difference the Sanhita makes in the courts that dispose of most criminal cases, is sentencing policy and not nomenclature, not the count of sections, and not the names on the cover. The honest description is a sentencing-policy statute wearing the clothes of a recodification, with two genuine annexes to that description: a set of new offence categories that redraw the map at its edges, and one omission, Section 377, whose consequences are of a different order from everything else in the dropped list.

The recommendations differ by reader, because the comparison yields different instruments for different hands. An advocate should treat the translation table as the working tool and the case law as transferable wherever the table records renumbering or redrafting, while isolating the substantively changed rows, the new categories and Section 152 as the places where Penal Code authority will not carry the argument and where the first appellate contests will be fought. A legislator or staffer measuring the exercise should count it a success in sentencing policy and consolidation, and an unfinished one in two specific places: the protection gap left by the omission of Section 377, which the Standing Committee identified before enactment, and the undefined phrases of Section 152, which a short amending Act could still confine. An aspirant preparing for examination should learn the comparison as a classification rather than as five hundred new numbers, and the study treatment of the criminal law reforms builds the revision structure around exactly that classification, because examiners ask what changed, and the defensible answer is the one this article has given, organised by kind of change rather than by section order.

The verdict has limits, and naming them is part of defending it. If the courts construe Section 152 broadly, the state offences chapter will grow in importance until it rivals sentencing as the Sanhita’s real legacy, and if they confine it to its protected object, the government’s account of the succession will have been vindicated in the place it matters most. If charging practice takes up the new categories with enthusiasm, organised crime and the terrorist act inside the general code could reshape prosecution patterns in ways a textual comparison can only flag. If courts use community service at scale, the diversion built for six petty offences will matter more than its small count suggests. Each of those is a question about the code in operation, and each will be answered by records rather than by texts. What the texts already settle is the shape of the change. Three-quarters of the Penal Code’s offence law stands where it stood, in new numbers and tidier rooms. The remaining quarter, and above all the sentencing quarter, is where the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita will be felt, and it is there, rather than in the quarrel over its name, that its claim to be a reform will be proved or lost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What actually changed between the IPC and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced 511 sections in twenty-three chapters with 358 sections in twenty chapters, most of that fall coming from consolidation rather than abolition. Definitions gathered into Section 2 and merged offence families explain much of the arithmetic. On the official accounting, twenty offences were added, nineteen provisions dropped, imprisonment raised for thirty-three offences, fines for eighty-three, mandatory minimums introduced for twenty-three, and community service for six. Organised crime, petty organised crime, the terrorist act and snatching entered the code for the first time, sedition’s label disappeared while a wider successor appeared in Section 152, and the sentencing structure changed more than the offence definitions did.

Q: Is the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita simply a renumbered IPC?

No, though renumbering is the largest single thing that happened. Counting the translation table in this article, forty-two of fifty-six mapped Penal Code provisions reach the Sanhita as renumbering or redrafting without substantive change, roughly three-quarters, so the continuity case is strong and honestly made. The remaining quarter is decisive, however. It contains a systematic sentencing package, a sixth punishment in community service, mandatory minimums across twenty-three offences, new offence categories built around organisation, scale and motive, a restructured gang rape punishment, and omissions that include the whole of Section 377. A renumbering exercise does not alter what a court may impose, and the Sanhita repeatedly does.

Q: How do you find the new section number for an old IPC section?

Start from the subject, not the number. Identify the family the old provision belonged to, homicide, property, offences against women and children, and look for that family in the Sanhita, where related offences sit together in consolidated sections. Then check whether the provision was merged into a larger section with sub-clauses, as theft was merged into Section 303 and the definitions into Section 2, because the correspondence is often to a sub-section rather than to a whole section. Cross-check the result against the bare text of both codes and against the punishment, since a genuine correspondence preserves the sentencing range or shows a deliberate change to it.

Q: Which is stricter on punishment, the IPC or the new code?

The Sanhita is stricter overall, on the strength of its own accounting. Imprisonment was increased for thirty-three offences, fines for eighty-three, and mandatory minimum punishment introduced for twenty-three, which together move the whole scale upward while removing judicial room at the bottom of it. Death by negligence rose from a maximum of two years under Section 304A to five under Section 106(1), and the death penalty was retained and extended to new offences including group murder and a terrorist act causing death. The strictness is not uniform, because the same code created community service for six petty offences and conditioned it, for first petty theft, on the value being returned or restored.

Q: Was the colonial character of the IPC actually removed?

Partly, and the honest answer separates symbol from substance. The name, the vocabulary of danda giving way to nyaya, and the disappearance of the sedition label are real changes in how the code presents itself, and the government presented them as the heart of the exercise. Yet most of the provisions that embodied the colonial state’s power had already been emptied by Indian institutions before 2023: mandatory death in Section 303 was struck down in 1983, Section 377 was read down in 2018, adultery was struck down the same year, and sedition itself had been narrowed by the Supreme Court in 1962 and held in abeyance in 2022. What the Sanhita removed directly was chiefly the inheritance’s remaining text.

Q: Do lawyers have to work with the IPC and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita at once?

Yes, and they will for a long period. Section 358 of the Sanhita saves pending investigations, proceedings and liabilities under the Penal Code, and Article 20(1) of the Constitution prevents a heavier new punishment being applied to an act committed before commencement. The date of the act therefore selects the code, so a practice handling both old and new matters cites the Penal Code for pre-commencement conduct and the Sanhita for conduct after 1 July 2024, often in the same week and occasionally in connected proceedings. Charge sheets, appeals and revisions keep the old numbering alive for as long as pre-commencement cases remain in the system, which the volume of pending trials makes a matter of years.

Q: Which Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita changes were cosmetic and which were substantive?

The cosmetic changes are the renaming of the code, the renumbering of provisions whose words and punishments survived intact, and the consolidation of scattered material into single sections, all of which change how the law is found rather than what it does. The substantive changes are those that alter an outcome: the sixth punishment of community service, mandatory minimums for twenty-three offences, raised imprisonment and fines, the restructuring of gang rape punishment in Section 70, the new categories of organised crime, petty organised crime, terrorist act and snatching, the succession from Section 124A to the wider and more heavily punished Section 152, and the omission of Section 377 without replacement. The test is always whether a court can now do something it could not do before.

Q: Did Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita renumbering create practical problems for courts?

It created transitional problems rather than permanent ones, and they were enlarged by the decision to replace all three criminal codes at once. Police officers, prosecutors, magistrates and advocates had to relearn the numbering of substantive law, procedure and evidence in the same season, while continuing to run pre-commencement cases under the old numbers, so dual citation became a daily discipline and errors in charge sheets cost adjournments and invited discharge applications. Retraining, updated manuals and correspondence tables reduced the burden over time, and the problems shrink as the stock of Penal Code cases works through the system. Critics of the simultaneous replacement argue the cost could have been spread by phasing the codes in one at a time.

Q: What is IPC Section 302 in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 302 of the Penal Code, the punishment for murder, corresponds to Section 103(1) of the Sanhita, and the punishment is unchanged in substance: death, or imprisonment for life, and liability to a fine. The definitions the punishment attaches to moved separately, with culpable homicide and murder defined in Sections 100 and 101, corresponding to Sections 299 and 300 of the Penal Code. What is new sits in the same section rather than in the correspondence itself, because Section 103(2) creates an aggravated form of murder committed by a group of five or more persons acting in concert on grounds of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief or any other similar ground.

Q: What is IPC Section 420 in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 420 of the Penal Code, cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, corresponds to Section 318(4) of the Sanhita. The whole cheating family, which the Penal Code spread across Sections 415 to 420, was gathered into the single Section 318, with the definition of cheating and its punishment grades arranged as sub-sections of one provision. The seven-year maximum that made Section 420 the provision practitioners cited is retained in Section 318(4), so the correspondence preserves the sentencing calibration practice had settled on. Finding it is the standard lesson of the new code: the answer is frequently a sub-section inside a consolidated section, not a section standing alone with its own number.

Q: What happened to Section 498A of the IPC in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 498A, cruelty by a husband or his relatives, was carried into the Sanhita as Section 85, which carries the punishment of imprisonment extending to three years and liability to a fine, read with Section 86, which carries the definition of cruelty the Penal Code had placed inside the same section. The substance is unchanged, so the large body of case law on the provision continues to govern its reading, and the recodification delivered no new settlement to either side of the long argument about the provision’s use. Its setting changed rather than its content, because Sections 85 and 86 sit inside Chapter V, the dedicated chapter on offences against women and children running from Section 63 to Section 99.

Q: Did the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita change the punishment for murder?

For murder itself, no. Section 103(1) carries the punishment of Section 302 of the Penal Code unchanged, death or imprisonment for life and fine, and the definitions in Sections 100 and 101 preserve the boundary between culpable homicide and murder on which the punishment depends. The changes gather around that stable core rather than inside it. Section 103(2) adds a distinct aggravated form for murder by a group of five or more acting in concert on listed identity grounds, at the same sentencing level. Section 104, replacing Section 303 of the Penal Code, removes the mandatory death sentence for murder by a life convict that the Supreme Court had struck down in Mithu v State of Punjab, restoring the court’s discretion in the text itself.

Q: What is the new offence of snatching in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 304 of the Sanhita makes snatching a free-standing offence, defined as forcibly or fraudulently seizing movable property, and punishable with imprisonment of up to three years. The conduct was not lawful under the Penal Code, but it fitted awkwardly into the available categories, since a sudden seizure of a chain, phone or bag had to be charged as theft, which understates the force involved, or as robbery, which requires elements a street seizure may not present. Separating snatching gives the charge sheet a label matching the incident as witnesses describe it, fixes a punishment calibrated to the pattern, and lets the conduct be recorded as itself rather than absorbed into neighbouring offences.

Q: What happened to Section 303 of the IPC in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 303 punished murder committed by a person under sentence of imprisonment for life with a mandatory death sentence, leaving the court no discretion. The Supreme Court struck that provision down in Mithu v State of Punjab in 1983, so for four decades the printed code stated a rule no court could lawfully apply. Section 104 of the Sanhita replaces it and codifies the position the judgment had produced, providing for death or imprisonment for life, expressed as imprisonment for the remainder of the convict’s natural life, at the sentencing court’s discretion. The change is best classified as the text catching up with doctrine: real against the printed Penal Code, modest against the law as courts had actually administered it since 1983.

Q: How is Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita different from Section 124A of the IPC?

Four differences are textual. The protected object changes from the government established by law to the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India. An express mental element appears, since Section 152 opens with the words purposely or knowingly, where Section 124A foregrounded the excitement of disaffection. The means are widened expressly to electronic communication and the use of financial means. The alternative punishment rises from a maximum of three years to a maximum of seven, with imprisonment for life retained in both. An Explanation protects comments expressing disapprobation of government measures aimed at their lawful alteration. What the text cannot settle is whether undefined phrases such as subversive activities will be read more broadly than sedition was after the Supreme Court narrowed it in Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar.

Q: How were the IPC’s scattered definitions consolidated in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

The Penal Code defined its terms one by one in separate sections running from Section 8 to Section 52A, so a reader consulting the code met definitions interleaved with the opening provisions. The Sanhita gathered that material into Section 2, a single section whose sub-clauses carry the definitions for the whole code. Nothing about the legal work a definition does changes because it sits in a sub-clause instead of a section, and a court consults Section 2 where it once consulted the separate provision. The consolidation is a genuine convenience and explains a large share of the fall from 511 sections to 358, which is why that fall cannot be read as a corresponding fall in the number of offences or propositions of law.

Q: Where did the IPC’s general exceptions go in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

The general exceptions, which in the Penal Code ran from Section 76 to Section 106, now stand in Chapter III of the Sanhita, running from Section 14 to Section 44. The relocation changes where a pleader looks and, by itself, nothing about the protection the exceptions give, because mistake of fact, accident, infancy, private defence and the rest decide whether conduct fitting an offence definition is criminal at all, and that function survived the move intact. One wording change inside the chapter deserves watching: the defence the Penal Code framed in Section 84 in terms of unsoundness of mind appears in Section 22 in terms of mental illness, and whether that substitution moves the legal test will be answered by courts construing Section 22 in actual cases.

Q: Do judgments delivered under the IPC still guide courts applying the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Yes, wherever the Sanhita re-enacts the language the judgments interpreted. Courts proceed on the basis that a legislature repeating words with a settled judicial meaning legislates against that meaning, so Penal Code authority on culpable homicide, common intention in Section 3(5), dishonest intention, and the general exceptions remains the working guide to the corresponding provisions. The guidance weakens exactly where the text changed. The narrowing gloss placed on Section 124A in Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar attached to words Parliament did not repeat, so Section 152 falls to be construed on its own terms, and the same caution applies to restructured provisions such as Section 70 and to the new offence categories, which arrive without an inherited body of interpretation.

Q: What is IPC Section 307 in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?

Section 307 of the Penal Code, attempt to murder, corresponds to Section 109 of the Sanhita, where the offence stands as a specific provision rather than being folded into the general law of attempt. The Sanhita places the general attempt provision in Section 62, corresponding to Section 511 of the Penal Code, immediately after abetment and criminal conspiracy, but it kept attempt to murder separate, preserving the signalling function of a charge that alleges an intention to kill and an act sufficiently proximate to killing. Because the offence survives in recognisable form, the accumulated case law on intention and proximity retains its footing, and the practitioner’s work is relocation of the citation rather than relearning of the doctrine.

Q: Did the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita change the punishment for theft?

The basic punishment did not change, and the changes gather at the edges of the offence. Section 303(2) of the Sanhita keeps imprisonment of up to three years for theft, as Sections 378 and 379 of the Penal Code provided between them, with the definition and punishment now consolidated in a single section. Two adjustments alter what theft leads to without altering what theft is. For a second or subsequent conviction, Section 303 prescribes enhanced rigorous imprisonment of one to five years, so persistence is met with a floor and a higher ceiling. At the opposite end, the proviso to Section 303(2) introduces community service for a first petty theft below five thousand rupees where the value of the property is returned or restored.