Section 198 punishes a public servant who knowingly disobeys any direction of law as to how they are to conduct themselves as such a public servant, intending to cause, or knowing it likely that such disobedience will cause, injury to any person, with simple imprisonment up to one year, or fine, or both. This is the opening section of Chapter XII (Of Offences By or Relating to Public Servants).
Verified against the National Crime Records Bureau's official BNS–IPC concordance (Sankalan Portal), which maps Section 198 to old IPC Section 166, and cross-checked directly against the bare text of both Acts, found to be word-for-word identical apart from the statutory Illustration's modernized phrase "by a Court" replacing the old law's "by a Court of Justice."
| BNS section | IPC, 1860 equivalent | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 198 | 166 | Exact |
Whoever, being a public servant, knowingly disobeys any direction of the law as to the way in which he is to conduct himself as such public servant, intending to cause, or knowing it to be likely that he will by such disobedience, cause injury to any person, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.
Illustration.—A, being an officer directed by law to take property in execution, in order to satisfy a decree pronounced in Z’s favour by a Court, knowingly disobeys that direction of law, with the knowledge that he is likely thereby to cause injury to Z. A has committed the offence defined in this section.
Source: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act No. 45 of 2023), as published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary.
These judgment(s) relate to Section 198 as a whole rather than to one specific sub-section, and so are presented together here rather than alongside a particular clause above.
This section requires the offender to be a public servant, to knowingly disobey a legal direction governing how they must conduct themselves in that role, and to either intend injury to result, or know it to be a likely consequence of the disobedience. The statutory Illustration involves an officer directed by law to execute a decree who deliberately disobeys that direction, knowing it is likely to injure the decree-holder.
This case was policeman versus policeman. A Deputy Superintendent of Police filed a complaint against two fellow police officers (a Superintendent and a Deputy Superintendent) for offences including public-servant misconduct, after those officers had earlier arrested him over a kidnapping complaint that turned out to be false. The accused officers raised a limitation objection very late — only at the revision stage before the Sessions Court — arguing the complaint was filed beyond the one-year period allowed under Section 161(1) of the Bombay Police Act, 1951 for acts done "under colour of duty." The Sessions Court agreed and dismissed the complaint; the High Court restored it, holding the limitation point couldn't be raised that late and that the order wasn't even revisable. The Supreme Court disagreed with the High Court on both counts and allowed the appeal, dismissing the complaint as time-barred. Along the way, the Court had to decide whether the offences alleged (including this one, the old IPC Section 166, now reproduced word-for-word as BNS Section 198) were "acts done under colour of duty" at all — and to do that, it set out the offence's own ingredients exactly as quoted above: the accused must be a public servant, and must have knowingly disobeyed a legal direction governing how a public servant in that position is to conduct himself, intending or knowing it likely that this disobedience will cause injury to someone. The Court held that an offence built on these ingredients cannot be committed except "under the colour of" being a public servant — confirming both what this section actually requires to prove, and why acts of this kind are treated as closely bound up with the office itself rather than a private wrong.
Currency check: decided 12 May 2000; no overruling or contrary larger-bench ruling found as of the date this page was last reviewed.
No. It applies only to a public servant disobeying a legal direction governing their own conduct in that role.
No. The section is satisfied by an intention to cause injury, or knowledge that injury is a likely consequence of the disobedience, whether or not injury actually results.
Simple imprisonment up to one year, or fine, or both.