On 12 June 2026, the Rajasthan High Court held that a former wife who continued Section 498A IPC proceedings against her ex-husband and his family after accepting ₹20 lakh as alimony and obtaining a decree of mutual divorce was abusing the process of law. The Court rejected the argument that the criminal case stood wholly independent of the settled matrimonial dispute.
The Allahabad High Court held that a Magistrate cannot add to or exclude penal sections from the police report at the stage of taking cognisance — alteration is a charge-framing function, and the accused's remedy is discharge, not Section 482 quashing.
A year into the operation of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the practitioner-level architecture is now substantially visible. The Supreme Court's April 2026 disposition in Narayan v. State of Madhya Pradesh settled the s.480(3) bail-condition question. Section 187(3)'s fragmentary-custody architecture has produced a competing High Court line — the Kulkarni interpretation against the Senthil Balaji line — without a definitive Article 141 resolution. The s.482 discretion has widened, on the Chhattisgarh High Court's reading. Trial in absentia under s.356, the s.183 recording-of-statements architecture, and the s.367–369 protective regime for accused with intellectual disability have each produced their own developing doctrine. This piece reads the year's jurisprudence as one practitioner architecture.