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Foreign nationals in India are subject to Indian criminal law in the same way as Indian citizens — they can be arrested, charged, tried, and imprisoned under Indian criminal law for offences committed on Indian territory.  However, foreigners have specific additional rights under international law and Indian domestic law that apply specifically to non-citizen detainees. The most important is consular access: the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963), to which India is a party, requires that when a foreign national is arrested, the arresting authorities must "without delay" inform the person of their right to have their consulate notified; if the person requests it, the consulate must be notified promptly. In practice — as documented by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) — only 5.7% of foreign prisoner cases involved actual consular access (2018 data); the gap between legal entitlement and administrative reality is wide. Representational Graphic: What Hap...

How the termination of This Country Called Us is categorically different from Penguin's withdrawal of Joe Sacco's book — and what it reveals about the Indian publishing industry's deepest ethical crisis. First Person:  Saket Suman When Penguin India refused to distribute Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot — a 135-page graphic investigation of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots that killed at least sixty people and displaced over sixty thousand, mostly Muslim — the Indian literary world reacted with appropriate alarm. Arundhati Roy called it "a terrible loss to Indian readers." The Wire reported it. The Print published Sacco's own account of what he was asked to remove. He refused. Penguin India walked away. Tharoor and Guha shouted condemnations.  Representational Image: Home Minister Amit Shah at a Rupa book launch.   The story was covered. The author was heard. The book is available through parallel channels — imported from the UK by independent South Delh...

India's criminal court system operates through a hierarchical structure that processes from initial magistrate hearings through sessions courts, High Courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. The overwhelming majority of criminal matters — FIR registration, bail, remand, committal proceedings, and summary trial of minor offences — are handled by Executive Magistrates and Judicial Magistrates at the lowest court tier.  Sessions Courts (one per district, headed by a District and Sessions Judge) handle serious offences including those punishable by more than 7 years imprisonment; High Courts (one per state or group of states) exercise original jurisdiction in constitutional matters, appellate jurisdiction over sessions court decisions, and supervisory jurisdiction over all subordinate courts; the Supreme Court of India is the final court of appeal and constitutional court. Representational Image: How the Indian Court System Handles Criminal Cases The criminal justice system's def...

India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) — established in 1986 under the Ministry of Home Affairs — publishes the definitive annual statistical record of crime in India, drawing on FIR data submitted by all police forces through the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS). The NCRB 2023 report (the last under the old IPC) recorded 6.24 million cognisable crimes — up 7.2% from 2022 — with a crime registered every five seconds.  The NCRB 2024 report (first year of BNS data) recorded 58.85 lakh (5.885 million) crimes — apparently down 6% from 62.41 lakh in 2023, but this decline is partly a statistical artefact of the BNS's reclassification of "simple hurt" as non-cognisable. The most significant trend across both years is unmistakable: traditional violent crime (murder, rape, robbery) is declining or stable while cybercrime is surging, reflecting India's rapid digitalisation and the criminal exploitation of its vulnerabilities. Representational I...

India's three new criminal codes — the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS, replacing the Indian Penal Code), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS, replacing the Code of Criminal Procedure), and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA, replacing the Indian Evidence Act) — came into force on July 1, 2024, representing the most comprehensive reform of India's criminal law architecture since the IPC was enacted in 1860.  All three were passed by Parliament in December 2023; the transition from 160-year-old colonial statutes to the new framework was significant both substantively (adding new offences, modifying procedures, incorporating digital evidence standards) and symbolically (removing colonial terminology and framing the laws in an Indian constitutional context).  Representational Visualization: How India's New Criminal Laws Work Crimes committed after July 1, 2024 are prosecuted under the new codes; crimes committed before that date continue under the old IPC/CrPC framew...

India's police system is a federal architecture in which policing is constitutionally a state subject under the Seventh Schedule's State List (Entry 2). Each of India's 28 states and 8 Union Territories maintains its own police force governed primarily by the Police Act, 1861 — a colonial statute designed for garrison policing that most states still operate under despite 30 years of reform recommendations.  As of January 1, 2024, the sanctioned strength of India's state police forces was 27.55 lakh (2.755 million) personnel comprising civil police, district armed police, special armed police, and Indian Reserve Battalions; the actual working strength was 21.62 lakh — indicating a nationwide vacancy of approximately 21%. India's sanctioned police-to-population ratio is 197.44 per lakh, while the UN recommends 222 per lakh; the actual deployed strength falls significantly below both. Representational Image: How India's Police System Works The system's senior l...