Continuity Amidst Legal Transformation: A Fundamental Study of Traditional Functionalities in Indian Police Administration under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Regime

Abstract

The introduction of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, alongside the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, is widely heralded as the most comprehensive overhaul of India’s criminal law since the colonial era. These enactments aim to modernise substantive offences, accelerate investigations, and shift the criminal justice system toward a citizen-oriented framework. Yet policing in India historically operates through administrative traditions that long predate independent India and even the late-colonial governance model. This study examines the paradox of legal transformation coexisting with administrative continuity, focusing on how traditional police functionalities—command hierarchy, preventive policing, investigation styles, documentation practices, and behavioural norms—persist despite sweeping legal change. Drawing upon doctrinal legal analysis, organisational theory, and empirical data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD), and state police reports, the study argues that policing outcomes are determined less by penal statutes and more by the culture, structure, and institutional memory of the police organisation. The BNS introduces new legal categories—terrorism, organised crime, mob lynching—and refines procedural standards, but these reforms have limited power to shift entrenched administrative practices. The research finds that institutional inertia, infrastructural limits, political influence, resource shortages, and lack of behavioural reform inhibit meaningful transformation. The study concludes that legal reform without administrative reform risks reproducing old policing patterns under a new legal regime, and lasting change requires restructuring police training, accountability mechanisms, resource allocation, and community relations.