Opinion | PM Modi: The Great Reformer

PM Modi broke with the assumption that a government's job is merely to manage what it inherits. Every government after his will be judged by the problems it chose to solve

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For most of independent India’s history, governments treated difficult reform as a debt that would fall due at the next election. Rewriting a colonial statute or touching a constitutional provision with a violent history seemed certain to cost more votes than it could win. So, each government inherited the country’s hardest problems and passed them on unopened.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governments have spent 12 years opening those files. The record stretches from the criminal courts to Kashmir, the marriage rights of Muslim women and women’s representation in Parliament. Each issue had sat on a predecessor’s desk for decades because the fight appeared unwinnable.

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A Code Written For An Empire

When the Indian Penal Code was enacted in 1860, the British Crown had ruled India for barely two years. Thomas Macaulay drafted it to maintain order among colonial subjects, and it remained in force for 77 years after independence. Replacing it meant retraining every police station, prosecutor and court in the country at once, a disruption no previous government was prepared to undertake.

That kind of overhaul helps explain why politically difficult reforms so often languish until the costs of inaction become impossible to ignore. Parliament passed the replacement laws in December 2023, and they took effect on July 1, 2024. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the penal code; criminal procedure moved to the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita; and the Indian Evidence Act of 1872 gave way to the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam.

Terrorism, organised crime and mob lynching now appear in the statute as offenses in their own right. A complainant can file an FIR online or at any police station, regardless of jurisdiction.

The change most likely to........

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