The Lutyens commentariat has a reliable ritual. The government changes something that survived from the Raj; Congress discovers a sudden emotional attachment to continuity; television studios announce that the republic is in mortal peril before anybody has read the schedules. The replacement of the Indian Penal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure and Indian Evidence Act produced exactly this performance. According to one camp, new titles completed decolonisation. According to the other, changing a comma was authoritarianism. I found both claims exhausting.
My position is simpler. Replacing nineteenth-century criminal laws was overdue, and the Modi government deserves credit for undertaking a politically difficult consolidation that earlier governments discussed without completing. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam came into force, with stated exceptions, on July 1, 2024; the operative notification is available in the official Gazette record. But the patriotic merit of discarding colonial nomenclature cannot substitute for the hard work of policing, prosecution, forensics and judicial capacity.
Congress’s nostalgia is not a legal philosophy
Congress criticism frequently begins from a strange presumption: because inherited law has accumulated precedent, altering it is inherently reckless. Stability certainly matters in criminal law. Liberty should not depend on officials learning a new manual mid-investigation. Yet stability cannot become a veto held by every institution comfortable with old forms. The IPC was not a sacred Indian inheritance. It was a colonial instrument repeatedly amended because social reality and constitutional values changed around it.
The opposition was entitled to object to particular clauses, drafting choices and the speed of parliamentary consideration. It was not entitled to behave as though the existing system represented a golden age of procedural fairness. Ask an undertrial waiting years for movement, a complainant revisiting a police station for updates or a witness summoned repeatedly without consequence. The old system’s familiarity often benefited the professional users of delay more than the citizen trapped inside it.
The government’s emphasis on electronic records, forensic processes and time-bound procedural steps moves in the right direction. The Ministry of Home Affairs told Parliament that the laws had been notified and implemented and outlined features relating to victims, electronic procedure and trials in its December 2024 Lok Sabha response. These changes acknowledge a basic truth that Congress governments evaded: criminal justice cannot remain organised around paper files wandering between desks while citizens live on smartphones.
I am also unmoved by the argument that Indian names somehow make statutes inaccessible. English abbreviations such as IPC and CrPC became familiar because institutions used them for decades, not because they descended from heaven in user-friendly form. Police officers, lawyers and judges can learn new names. Citizens routinely navigate far more complicated financial and technological terminology. The useful question is whether the substance is understandable, translated well and consistently applied.
A new code still meets the old police station
Here is where government supporters must stop applauding and start inspecting. A modern statute entering an understaffed police station does not magically produce modern justice. If investigating officers lack forensic support, reliable connectivity, training time and manageable caseloads, digital mandates become another compliance box. One can replace a handwritten delay with an uploaded delay. The citizen notices no decolonisation at all.
Training is not a launch event. The Home Ministry’s own advisory on training police and prison personnel recognised the scale of preparing officers for new provisions. That process needs recurring assessment, scenario-based instruction and public reporting. An officer who completed an online module is not necessarily equipped to collect electronic evidence properly or explain new victim rights at two in the morning.
India’s federal structure makes implementation more complicated than Delhi press conferences suggest. Police and prisons are administered by states with wildly different budgets, vacancies and technical capabilities. A wealthy urban force and a rural station cannot be given identical deadlines and then judged by the same dashboard. The Centre should set standards and finance common infrastructure while publishing state-level readiness. State governments, including those ruled by the opposition, must not treat implementation failures as a convenient weapon against laws they are constitutionally required to administer.
The judiciary is the largest reality check. Police procedure may accelerate, but cases still enter courts burdened by vacancies, adjournments and uneven administrative technology. Time limits written into law are useful signals only if judges, prosecutors, legal-aid lawyers and court staff have the capacity to honour them. Otherwise the deadline becomes ceremonial, followed by another application explaining why it could not be met.
Rights require more than good intentions
I am sympathetic to the government’s claim that the new framework is victim-centred. Indian legal debate can become so consumed by procedural theory that the victim appears only as a prop in rival arguments. Timely information, electronic access and more predictable procedure can reduce humiliation. Yet a victim-centred system must not become an excuse for weak safeguards. Wrongful arrest, coerced confession and careless evidence harm both the accused and the real victim by making prosecution unreliable.
Provisions governing police custody, trial in absence and broadly framed offences deserve careful judicial and parliamentary scrutiny. Saying so is not joining a left-liberal conspiracy. A strong state is not one that maximises discretion; it is one that exercises power predictably under rules. The BJP should understand this better than Congress, whose own history includes the Emergency and repeated use of expansive state power while its admirers lecture everyone else about institutional virtue.
The government should publish granular data: time from complaint to registration, forensic turnaround, custody applications, charge-sheet delays, legal-aid access and case disposal under the new codes. Aggregate claims about thousands of trainings or digital filings tell us about activity, not justice. I want to know whether a woman reporting violence receives a prompt response, whether a poor accused person meets competent counsel and whether electronic evidence survives courtroom examination.
Independent review after several years would strengthen rather than embarrass the reform. Parliament should hear police officers, trial judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, victims’ groups and forensic experts. Drafting defects can be corrected. Unintended consequences can be measured. The Congress tendency is to treat amendment as proof that the original exercise failed. Adults understand that serious legislation improves through evidence.
Decolonisation must reach conduct
The word “colonial” is used too cheaply in our politics. A statute can acquire an Indian name while the citizen still encounters the colonial habits of distance, opacity and command. A constable refusing to register a complaint, an official demanding unnecessary presence and a court speaking only to lawyers reproduce those habits regardless of the code’s title. Real decolonisation makes authority answerable to the person subject to it.
This is why I reject the commentariat’s mockery of symbolic change without accepting the government’s temptation to oversell it. Symbols matter. A sovereign country need not preserve Macaulay-era labels forever merely to reassure English-speaking lawyers. But symbolism should open the door to institutional reform, not close the argument with a self-congratulatory ceremony.
Congress might have contributed by identifying provisions requiring narrower drafting, proposing funded state-capacity plans and demanding measurable safeguards. Instead, much of its ecosystem returned to its favourite register: the government is sinister, Parliament is dead and only the ancien régime’s interpreters can rescue democracy. That routine now persuades mainly the people performing it.
The Modi government has done the difficult first part: it moved beyond endless consultation and replaced the codes. It now owns the difficult second part too. It must ensure training is real, forensic facilities are available, legal aid is competent, data are public and police discretion is reviewable. Ministers cannot blame colonial inheritance once their own framework is operating.
I want the reform to succeed because the old system’s delays and indignities were indefensible. I will not pretend every new clause is wise or every implementation claim proven. That combination—support for the direction, scepticism about delivery—is apparently too complicated for partisan television. It should not be too complicated for a government confident in its mandate. India needed new criminal laws. What it needs now is new criminal justice.
