For 163 years, India’s criminal justice system operated under the Indian Penal Code, a law originally drafted during British colonial rule. From July 1, 2024, Modi’s government replaced it, along with the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act, with three new codes. This article explains what changed and the debate surrounding how the changes were passed.
The Three New Codes
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam replaced the Indian Evidence Act, all taking effect from July 1, 2024, according to Business Standard’s coverage marking the transition, replacing what the outlet described as “colonial-era” legislation with laws the government positioned as reflecting contemporary Indian legal and social priorities.
The Specific Changes: Mob Lynching and the Death Penalty
Among the most discussed specific changes, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita introduced the death penalty as a possible punishment for mob lynching for the first time, alongside alternative sentences of life imprisonment or a minimum 20-year prison term, according to reporting by the Tribune India and ANI at the time of the bill’s passage, a provision responding to a pattern of mob violence incidents that had drawn sustained public concern in preceding years.
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The Removal of “Sedition” as a Specific Term
The new code also removed the specific word “sedition” from India’s criminal law vocabulary, according to ANI’s reporting, replacing the colonial-era sedition provision with a reworded offence covering acts endangering India’s sovereignty, unity, and integrity, a change the government characterised as modernising outdated colonial-era language, while critics, according to the same reporting, raised concerns about whether the underlying offence’s substance had genuinely narrowed or simply been relabelled with a new name while retaining similarly broad potential for application against dissent and criticism of the government.
The Rushed-Passage Criticism
The manner in which the three bills were passed through Parliament drew sustained criticism specifically. Deccan Herald’s coverage carried Congress’s allegation, in a headline stating BJP had “misled Parliament,” relating to the circumstances surrounding the bills’ passage, part of a broader opposition critique that the sweeping overhaul of India’s entire criminal justice framework, covering offences, procedure, and evidence law simultaneously, received insufficient parliamentary debate and committee scrutiny relative to the scale and consequence of the changes involved, a criticism connecting to the broader pattern of declining committee-referral rates for legislation covered in more detail in our earlier article on bills passed in Parliament during Modi’s tenure.
Other Notable Changes
Beyond mob lynching and sedition specifically, the new codes introduced several other changes, including expanded provisions for the use of forensic evidence and technology in investigations, updated definitions for certain offences to reflect contemporary circumstances not anticipated by the original 19th-century legislation, and procedural changes aimed at reducing trial delays, according to AuthBridge’s summary of the 2024 legal overhaul’s key highlights.
The Legal Community’s Mixed Response
Legal commentary on the transition has reflected a genuinely mixed assessment. LexisNexis’s analysis of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s reforms acknowledged the codes address some genuine gaps and outdated language in the previous colonial-era framework, while legal practitioners have also raised practical implementation concerns about the transition itself, since criminal cases already in progress under the old codes at the time of the July 2024 changeover required careful procedural handling to determine which legal framework applied to ongoing versus newly filed cases, a transition complexity that added genuine practical burden for courts and legal practitioners during the changeover period.
A New Offence With No Precedent in the Old IPC
One specific change illustrates how the new code goes beyond simply reorganising existing IPC provisions: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s Section 111 creates “organised crime” as a standalone, independently defined criminal offence for the first time anywhere in India’s central criminal law, according to LiveLaw’s coverage of a Punjab and Haryana High Court judgment discussing the provision. Previously, organised crime as a specifically defined category existed only under certain state-specific special laws, such as Maharashtra’s MCOCA, rather than under any central law applicable uniformly across the entire country. Under the new provision, organised crime resulting in a victim’s death can draw punishment up to the death penalty or life imprisonment, a genuinely new legal tool for central prosecutors rather than a renamed or reorganised version of anything that existed in the old Indian Penal Code.
Bottom Line
Modi’s government replaced India’s 163-year-old Indian Penal Code and related colonial-era criminal laws with three new codes from July 2024, introducing changes including a mob-lynching death penalty provision and removing the specific term “sedition” in favour of reworded language, reforms the government has framed as modernisation but which opposition parties and some legal commentators have criticised for receiving what they characterise as insufficient parliamentary scrutiny given the scale of the overhaul.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available legislative records and news reports listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India or the Ministry of Home Affairs.
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