Section 61 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) deals with criminal conspiracy. Sub-section (1) defines the offence, and Section 61(2) - the successor of the famous Section 120B IPC - prescribes the punishment. The official comparison table records that the IPC punishment section was included as a sub-section of the BNS provision, without a separate heading, when the new code came into force on 1 July 2024.
What Section 61 BNS provides
- Section 61(1) - a criminal conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to do, or cause to be done, an illegal act, or an act which is not illegal but is done by illegal means. Where the agreement is for anything other than committing an offence, some act besides the agreement must be done in pursuance of it before the conspiracy is punishable.
- Section 61(2) - the punishment provision, the old Section 120B IPC. It operates in two tiers: a party to a conspiracy to commit a serious offence (punishable with death, imprisonment for life or rigorous imprisonment of two years or more) is, where no express punishment is provided, punished as if he had abetted that offence; a party to any other criminal conspiracy is punished with imprisonment of up to six months, or fine, or both.
The essentials in plain language
The agreement itself is the offence. Once two or more persons agree to commit an offence, the conspiracy is complete - the planned crime does not have to be carried out, and each conspirator need not know every detail or every other member. Because people rarely sign conspiracy agreements, the courts allow the agreement to be proved by circumstantial evidence: conduct, meetings, communications and the sequence of events, viewed together. At the same time, mere knowledge of a plan, or mere association with the plotters, is not enough - what must be shown is a meeting of minds to bring about the unlawful object.
Procedure, bail and trial
Criminal conspiracy takes its seriousness from its object. Under the two-tier scheme, conspiring to commit a serious offence is punished like abetment of that offence, so the classification - whether the case is cognizable or bailable, and which court tries it - in practice follows the offence that was the object of the conspiracy. Conspiracy is therefore almost always charged alongside the substantive offences, and it allows the acts and statements of one conspirator in furtherance of the common design to be used against the others under the evidence law.
What changed from the IPC
In substance, nothing. The comparison table records that Section 120B IPC was carried into the BNS as sub-section 61(2), "sans heading" - the definition and the punishment now sit together in one section instead of two separate ones. A conspiracy case that would earlier have been charged as "120B read with" the substantive offence is now charged as "61(2) read with" the corresponding BNS offence, and the case law developed under Sections 120A and 120B IPC continues to apply.
Leading Supreme Court judgments
- Kehar Singh v. State (Delhi Administration) (1988) - the agreement is the gist of the offence of criminal conspiracy, and since direct evidence of an agreement is rare, it may be proved from the circumstances and the conduct of the accused.
Named in a conspiracy charge, or pursuing one? Conspiracy cases are won and lost on how the circumstantial chain is built or broken. Talk to a criminal lawyer in your city or browse advocates in the Free Law directory.