Section 232 punishes, under sub-section (1), whoever threatens another with any injury to their person, reputation, or property, or to the person or reputation of anyone in whom that person is interested, with intent to cause that person to give false evidence, with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years, or with fine, or with both. Under sub-section (2), if an innocent person is convicted and sentenced to death or to imprisonment for more than seven years in consequence of such false evidence, the person who made the threat is punished with the same punishment and sentence, in the same manner and to the same extent, as that innocent person.
The National Crime Records Bureau's official BNS–IPC concordance (Sankalan Portal) maps Section 232 to old IPC Section 195A. A search of the text of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 consulted for this page found no occurrence of "195A"; that text runs directly from the end of old Section 195 (including its statutory Illustration) straight into old Section 196 ("Using evidence known to be false"), with no Section 195A appearing in between at all. The provision the concordance names is therefore not printed in the text consulted.
| BNS section | IPC, 1860 equivalent | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 232 | 195A (text not in the IPC edition consulted) | Sourcing gap |
Sourcing gap: a reliable statutory-text comparison cannot be completed for this section because the text of old IPC Section 195A is not printed in the IPC text consulted.
(1) Whoever threatens another with any injury to his person, reputation or property or to the person or reputation of any one in whom that person is interested, with intent to cause that person to give false evidence shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years, or with fine, or with both.
(2) If innocent person is convicted and sentenced in consequence of false evidence referred to in sub-section (1), with death or imprisonment for more than seven years, the person who threatens shall be punished with the same punishment and sentence in the same manner and to the same extent such innocent person is punished and sentenced.
Source: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act No. 45 of 2023), as published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary.
Whoever threatens another with injury to their person, reputation, or property—or to a person or the reputation of someone the threatened person is interested in—with the intent to cause the threatened person to give false evidence, falls within this sub-section.
Where the false evidence procured by the threat under sub-section (1) results in an innocent person being convicted and sentenced to death or to imprisonment for more than seven years, the person who made the threat faces the same punishment and sentence as that innocent person, in the same manner and to the same extent.
Imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years, or fine, or both.
Under sub-section (2), if the innocent person is convicted and sentenced to death or to more than seven years' imprisonment as a result, the person who made the threat is punished with that same punishment and sentence.
This comparison is currently flagged as a sourcing gap: the National Crime Records Bureau's concordance maps this section to old IPC Section 195A, but that provision is not printed in the text of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 consulted for this page, so no comparison of the two texts could be made.