FROM IPC TO BHARTIYA NYAYA SANHITA: RECASTING ‘COERCION’ UNDER SECTION 15 OF THE INDIAN CONTRACT ACT IN CASES OF THREAT TO COMMIT SUICIDE

Abstract

Indian Contract Act, 1872, section 15 is premised on the fact that a contract ought to be seen as a product of free and voluntary assent and not through the exertion of unreasonable force or coercion. To a short time not so long ago, the Indian courts have conceptualised the concept of coercion within the scope of criminal law, and the term act prohibited by law has been used in many instances, interchangeably with that which is imprisonable under the Indian Penal Code, 1860. A vexed legal debate has been whether a suicide threat meets the definition of coercion or not in the scheme of things. Previously, a criminalisation of an attempt to commit suicide by Section 309 of the IPC was used as the actual or hypothetical ground to make forcible what was said on the ground of such criminalisation and to rescind the contracts made by some threats.

The latest changes in the law have rendered a good deal of unstable ground on this stand. The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, made one assumption that someone who attempts suicide is under the extreme load of the psyche, and they do not have to be a subject of criminal prosecution. Another way to support this tendency was the fact that even the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023) does not refer to suicide as a criminal act. The decriminalisation of suicide has upset the historic proportions between the force and the law of criminality, and in this respect, questions whether the criminal illegality of the old law of Section 15 applies to the cases that deal with the threat of suicide.

The key question that is posed in this paper is as follows: can and on what doctrinal basis can an attempt to commit suicide invalidate contractual consent in the post-IPC regime of law? The paper assumes a doctrinal approach and a comparative approach of statutory analysis of the statutes, as well as judicial response or comparative judicial reaction. This concludes that, first and foremost, coercion should not be the measure of the influence it has on free will but must instead be determined through the fact that the threatened act is criminal and that the threat of suicide may yet be a psychological form of coercion which is capable of inducing invalid consent.