Unmasking the Rhetoric of Reform – The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 in Context

This legislative comment is a critical analysis of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (‘BSA’), which has replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (‘IEA’). It analyses the major changes brought in by the BSA and discusses their implications. It further highlights the existing interpretive disputes within the IEA that the BSA leaves unaddressed. The BSA makes only a few substantive changes in improvement to the IEA, such as streamlining the rules on electronic evidence and expanding the scope of secondary evidence. Apart from this, most changes pertain to the renumbering of existing provisions and the deletion of obsolete colonial references. These could just as easily have been achieved through an amendment to the IEA. All major rules of evidence on relevancy, presumptions, burdens of proof, examination of witnesses, etc., remain unchanged by the BSA. The BSA is also replete with shoddy drafting errors, some of which remain unaddressed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee's intervention. The article argues that the BSA is effectively an episodic amendment of IEA masquerading as an exercise in reform.