What the Sanhita Dropped

In one line

The Sanhita repealed the Penal Code and re-enacted almost all of it, and a screen of every Penal Code heading against the whole Sanhita text returns exactly three whose distinctive words appear nowhere in it: sedition, thug, and adultery.

The repeal

Section 358 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, repeal and savings.

• The Indian Penal Code is hereby repealed.
• The repeal shall not affect the previous operation of the Code or anything duly done or suffered under it; any right, privilege, obligation or liability acquired, accrued or incurred under it; any penalty or punishment incurred for offences against it; any investigation or remedy in respect of such a penalty or punishment; or any proceeding, investigation or remedy in respect of it. Such a proceeding may be instituted, continued or enforced, and any such penalty may be imposed, as if that Code had not been repealed.
• And anything done or any action taken under the Code shall be deemed to have been done or taken under the corresponding provisions of this Sanhita.

Two consequences follow, and an answer that omits them is incomplete.

A repeal does not undo the past. Conduct committed while the Code was in force is prosecuted under the Code, and this is exactly what the ex post facto chapter in module III requires: no conviction except for the violation of a law in force at the time of the act.

And "corresponding provisions" presupposes that most provisions have one. The Sanhita is a re-enactment, not a fresh code. The interesting question is therefore not what it changed but what it has no corresponding provision for.

How the count was made

The method matters more than the result, because an assertion about what a code dropped is exactly the kind of claim that gets recalled rather than checked.

Step one. Every section heading of the Penal Code was extracted from the India Code consolidated print of it. That produced 530 distinct section numbers, including the lettered sections.

Step two. From each heading, the distinctive words were taken, discarding the ordinary connecting words of a statute.

Step three. Each heading was tested against the whole text of the Sanhita, not merely its headings, asking whether any of its distinctive words appears anywhere in it.

Step four. Every heading that scored zero was then read by hand against the Sanhita.

The screen is deliberately crude in one direction: it is a lexical test, not a legal one, so it under reports. An offence dropped in substance but sharing a word with a surviving provision will not appear. What the screen catches with certainty is an offence whose vocabulary has vanished entirely, and that is a strong result rather than a complete one.