Legal Kanoon IQ 2 min read

Two criminal codes, one live matter

Offences committed before the new codes came into force are tried under the old ones. For years to come, practice means holding both in your head at once.

The situation

A chargesheet filed under the Indian Penal Code sits beside one filed under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The older matter stays with the old code and the old procedure; the newer one does not. The same chamber is running both, and will be for as long as the older matters take to finish.

Every piece of research, every precedent, every form and every draft now has to be placed on one side of that line or the other. A section number alone no longer tells you which code is meant, and a judgment from last decade is written entirely in the old numbering.

Why it is hard

The mapping is not one to one

Provisions were merged, split, renumbered and in places substantively changed. A lookup table that pairs an old section with a new one hides exactly the cases where something moved rather than being renamed.

Precedent is written in the old numbering

Decades of authority cite IPC, CrPC and the Evidence Act. Using it in a matter under the new codes means translating in both directions and knowing when the translation does not hold.

Which code applies is a fact about the offence, not the filing

The date of the alleged offence governs. A matter filed after the commencement can still be an old-code matter, and getting that wrong is visible from the first page of the draft.

How we approach it

Kanoon IQ Litigator maps IPC to BNS, CrPC to BNSS and the Evidence Act to BSA in both directions, and marks each mapping as a renumbering, a merge, a split or a substantive change rather than flattening all four into an equivalence. Where a provision changed in substance, that is said, with both texts shown.

Applied to a matter, it reads the alleged dates from the record, identifies which code governs, and checks the draft for references to the other one. Authorities cited in the old numbering are shown against their new counterparts, with the ones that do not map cleanly called out.

What changes

Old and new codes mapped in both directions, with merges and splits marked
Substantive changes distinguished from pure renumbering
The governing code derived from the dates in the record
Drafts checked for references to the code that does not apply

Is this your problem too?

Bring the version of it you actually have. We will tell you what it would take, including when the answer is that it is not worth doing.

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