History of Criminal law

If your neighbour scratches your car, you can do two very different things: send him a legal notice asking for repair costs, or go to the police. The first is about getting your money back. The second brings in the State, and the State can take away his liberty. Why does the law treat the same scratch in two ways, and why is the book the police use today called the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and not the Indian Penal Code your seniors studied? The answer runs through a hundred and sixty years of history.

In two minutes

Indian criminal law moved from a patchwork of local and religious systems, to one codified Indian Penal Code drafted under Macaulay and enacted as Act 45 of 1860, to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 which replaced it on 1 July 2024; and throughout, a crime is a wrong against society that the State prosecutes, unlike a civil wrong which a private person sues on.

The rest of this chapter

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