When the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the IPC in 2024, it didn't just modernise India's criminal law; it left an entire category of sexual violence with no name and no FIR.

In June 2026, a young cancer patient in Kurukshetra, Haryana, alleged that he was sexually assaulted by two policemen and a home guard inside a police station. The investigating officer did not dispute that the complaint described an act of sodomy. Yet the FIR registered against the accused was not for sexual assault; it was for simple "hurt" under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). Asked why, the Deputy Superintendent of Police investigating the case said it plainly: even if the allegations are proven true in full, there is no penal provision under the new law that fits.

That single sentence captures, more precisely than any policy paper could, what India's criminal law reform actually did to male victims of sexual violence. It didn't tighten a loophole. It removed the door entirely.

Section 63 of the BNS, the provision that replaced Section 375 of the old Indian Penal Code, defines rape exclusively as an act committed by a man against a woman. Every category of penetrative and non-penetrative sexual violence the section lists is written around a male perpetrator and a female victim. Nowhere in the section, or anywhere else in the BNS, is there a provision recognising that a man, or a transgender person, can be raped.

This isn't an oversight buried in legal phrasing. It is the architecture of the law. The chapter housing Section 63 is titled "Of Offences Against Woman and Children", a heading that forecloses, by design, any future judicial reading that might extend the provision to other victims.

The old IPC was not gender-neutral either, but it had a safety net: Section 377, the colonial-era "unnatural offences" provision. After the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India decriminalised consensual same-sex relations between adults, Section 377 survived in a narrower form; it continued to criminalise non-consensual acts against men, sexual offences against transgender persons, and bestiality. Imperfect as it was, it meant a man who was raped had somewhere to take his complaint.

When the BNS came into force on 1 July 2024, Section 377 was dropped altogether, and nothing was put in its place. The practical result, as the Kurukshetra case shows, is that an adult male victim today can only be slotted into provisions for hurt, grievous hurt, wrongful confinement, or criminal intimidation, none of which carry the cognisability, the non-bailable status, or the sentencing weight that a sexual offence demands. Voluntarily causing hurt under the BNS is bailable and non-cognisable; the accused cannot even be arrested without a warrant.

There's a particularly stark inconsistency buried in this gap. Under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, sexual assault is already gender-neutral; a boy who is sexually assaulted is fully protected by law, regardless of who assaults him. The day that boy turns eighteen, the law's protection for that exact same act simply switches off.

This was not an accident nobody saw coming. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, chaired by BJP Rajya Sabha MP Brij Lal, examined the BNS bill and submitted its report to the Rajya Sabha on 10 November 2023. The committee explicitly flagged that the new code made no provision for non-consensual sexual offences against male, female, or transgender persons, and recommended that Section 377 be reintroduced to align with the BNS's own stated goal of moving toward gender-neutral offences. It called this step necessary, not optional.

The government did not accept the recommendation. The final BNS carries no such provision. The concern surfaced again on the floor of Parliament. During debate on the bills in December 2023, Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi asked whether only women could be stalked or raped, and whether male and transgender victims had been considered at all. His question was met with ridicule, and the legislation passed without addressing it.

The gap has since reached the courts. In a public interest litigation filed by advocate Gantavya Gulati, the Delhi High Court in August 2024 directed the Centre to treat the petition as a formal representation and decide the matter within six months. The petition argued that excluding non-consensual sexual offences from the BNS violated Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution. As of the matter's last listing before the court this February, the Centre had still not filed a substantive response, having earlier argued that courts cannot direct Parliament to legislate a particular provision.

Nearly two years after the law took effect, the question remains open — in Parliament's record, in a pending court file, and now in a Haryana police station's FIR register.

The BNS did make some gestures toward gender-neutral language elsewhere, swapping out words like "men" for terms like "whoever" or "any person" in select provisions. But legal practitioners have pointed out that this is cosmetic rather than substantive: the pronouns describing victims in these very provisions remain "she" and "her" throughout. The vocabulary shifted; the underlying assumption about who can be a victim did not.

As one senior criminal lawyer practising in the Punjab and Haryana High Court put it to reporters: if the intent was to decriminalise consensual relations between men, the law could have retained a separate provision for cases where a man is sexually assaulted by another man without consent. Instead, two victims of conceptually identical violations one a minor, one an adult are now treated under entirely different legal regimes, simply because of age.

Excluding men and transgender persons from rape law as currently framed sits uneasily against three specific constitutional guarantees: Article 14 (equality before law), Article 15 (non-discrimination), and Article 21 (the right to life and personal liberty, which the Supreme Court has long read to include dignity and bodily integrity). A law that recognises sexual violation only when the victim is female effectively tells half the population that an identical act committed against them carries no name in criminal law.

The stakes are not abstract. Mental health researchers have repeatedly noted that sexual assault carries comparable psychological harm regardless of the survivor's gender, and India's male suicide numbers, which dwarf female suicide numbers in NCRB data, are a grim backdrop against which this legal silence sits.

India replaced a colonial-era penal code with a modern one and, in the process, used the opportunity to expand protections for women, raising the age of consent, widening the definition of rape, recognising forced acts beyond penetration. Those were real, substantive gains. But that same exercise also quietly closed off legal recourse for an entire category of rape victims who had at least nominal protection under the older, more flawed law.

A reform exercise that makes language more inclusive while making protection less inclusive isn't progress; it's a trade nobody voted for. Until Parliament acts, or the Delhi High Court forces its hand, the answer a Haryana cancer patient was given by the police investigating his case will remain the legal answer for every adult man and transgender person in India: there is no penal provision available.

References:

• Manav, Sushil. "Haryana cops accused of custodial sodomy but FIR only for simple hurt: The BNS blind spot." ThePrint, 21 June 2026.
• Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 — Section 63: Rape, Bare Act text. LawRato.com.
• PRS Legislative Research. "The Bharatiya Nyaya (Second) Sanhita, 2023 — Bill Summary."
• "Three proposed criminal laws are much-needed reforms: Parliamentary panel." Business Standard, 10 November 2023. (Report on the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs' findings and Section 377 recommendation.)
• "New criminal law Bill omits Section 377: How this impacts men and trans persons." The News Minute, 14 December 2023.
• "Omission of IPC Section 377 from Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita: Two steps backwards in the fight towards gender-neutral offences." The South First, 30 June 2024.
• "Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 Fails Male and Transgender." BNB Legal, 30 July 2024. (Background on the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, 2013, and the gender-neutrality debate.)
• Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1 — Supreme Court judgment reading down Section 377 IPC.
• "Make India's Rape Laws Gender-Neutral in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita." Change.org petition, June 2024.

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