Section 102 addresses "transferred" culpable homicide: where a person, by an act done with intent or knowledge of likelihood to cause death, commits culpable homicide by causing the death of someone whom the offender neither intended nor knew himself likely to kill, the offence is treated as being of the same description it would have been had the person whom the offender intended or knew himself likely to kill actually died instead.
Verified against the National Crime Records Bureau's official BNS–IPC concordance (Sankalan Portal), which maps Section 102 to old IPC Section 301, and cross-checked directly against the bare text of both Acts. This is the correct provision for what is commonly referred to as "transferred malice" in the context of culpable homicide.
| BNS section | IPC, 1860 equivalent | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 102 | 301 | Exact |
Comparing the two texts word for word, Section 102 is reproduced without any substantive change from old IPC Section 301.
If a person, by doing anything which he intends or knows to be likely to cause death, commits culpable homicide by causing the death of any person, whose death he neither intends nor knows himself to be likely to cause, the culpable homicide committed by the offender is of the description of which it would have been if he had caused the death of the person whose death he intended or knew himself to be likely to cause.
Source: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act No. 45 of 2023), as published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary.
Section 102 answers a specific question: what happens when an act done with the intent, or knowledge of likelihood, to kill one person instead kills someone else entirely, whom the offender neither intended nor knew himself likely to kill? The answer is that the offence is not judged by reference to the actual, unintended victim at all — it is treated as the same kind of offence it would have been had the intended or known-likely victim actually died. The offender's state of mind is effectively carried across, or "transferred," from the intended victim to the actual one.
These judgment(s) relate to Section 102 as a whole rather than to one specific sub-section, and so are presented together here rather than alongside a particular clause above.
Directly construes s.301 IPC (BNS 102), culpable homicide by causing death of a person other than the one intended.
No. Section 102 specifically addresses this situation — the offence is judged as though the intended or known-likely victim had died, regardless of who was actually killed.
Yes, that is the commonly used descriptive term for the principle this section codifies, though the section itself does not use that phrase.
No. It is a purely definitional and redirecting provision. The actual offence and punishment depend on which description — murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, or another — would have applied had the intended victim died.