Battery

In one line

Battery is the actual application of force to another person, however slight, without his consent and without lawful justification.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: battery is the intentional and direct application of physical force to the person of another without lawful justification; the force may be of the slightest kind and no injury need result, since the tort is actionable per se; it is committed as much by contact through an object or a substance as by the hand, and it is answered by consent, private defence, necessity, lawful arrest and lawful authority.

The essentials

1. Use of force. Any physical contact suffices. Spitting on a person, throwing water at him, snatching a book from his hand, pulling a chair away as he sits down and setting a dog on him are each a battery. The force need not be violent and need not hurt.

2. Without lawful justification. The contact must be one the law does not permit. This is where consent, private defence, necessity and lawful authority operate.

3. Directness. The force must be applied by the defendant's act, immediately. Contact through an instrument or a missile is direct; harm that follows later as a consequence is not.

4. Intention, or at least a voluntary act. The defendant must have meant the act. He need not have meant the harm, and he need not have known who would be struck.

Damage is NOT an essential. A battery is complete when the contact happens.

What is not a battery

The ordinary contact of daily life. Being jostled in a crowded train, tapped on the shoulder to attract attention, or brushed against in a queue is not actionable, because such contacts are generally accepted as unavoidable.

Contact with consent. A surgeon who operates with consent, a barber who cuts hair, a player tackled in a game, and a passenger who takes a crowded bus have all consented, expressly or by implication, to contact of that kind. Chapter [Volenti Non Fit Injuria] sets out the limits, and the consent extends only to the ordinary risks of the activity.

Contact by an involuntary act. A person pushed into another, or moving in a fit, has not acted voluntarily.

Contact justified by law. A police officer making a lawful arrest, a parent restraining a child, a person using reasonable force in private defence.

The criminal counterpart

The penal law does not use the word battery. Section 129 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 defines criminal force: intentionally using force to any person without that person's consent, in order to commit an offence, or intending or knowing it likely that the force will cause injury, fear or annoyance to the person to whom it is used. Section 131 punishes assault or criminal force otherwise than on grave and sudden provocation.