Sajjad Husain LawSajjad Husain Law Associates

Introduction

Section 119 covered the Act's broadest, most discretionary presumption. Section 118 is its opposite in almost every respect: narrow, mandatory, and built around a single tragic fact pattern that Parliament decided courts could no longer be permitted to treat as an ordinary unnatural-death inquiry. This is the presumption as to dowry death — one of the most frequently invoked provisions in Indian criminal trials, and one the Supreme Court applied directly, and pointedly, as recently as February 2026.

This article covers Section 118's text, its unchanged carry-over from the Indian Evidence Act, the four-part test that has governed it since 2003, and the 2026 Supreme Court ruling that cancelled a High Court bail order for failing to give the presumption the weight the statute demands.

Section 118 BSA vs. Section 113B IEA: Unchanged, Except the Cross-Reference

Cross-checked word for word against two independent sources, Section 118 carries forward Section 113B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 — itself inserted in 1986, alongside the substantive offence of dowry death in Section 304B of the Indian Penal Code, as part of the same legislative package responding to the dowry-death crisis of the 1980s. The operative sentence is identical; only the Explanation's cross-reference is updated, from IPC Section 304B to BNS Section 80.

Kaliyaperumal v. State of Tamil Nadu: The Four-Part Test

The presumption's essential ingredients were authoritatively settled in Kaliyaperumal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2003) 8 SCC 749, which distilled Section 113B IEA — and therefore Section 118 BSA — into four conditions that must all be independently established before the presumption is triggered: (1) the question before the court must genuinely be whether the accused caused a dowry death within the meaning of the substantive offence; (2) the woman was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or his relatives; (3) that cruelty or harassment was for, or in connection with, a demand for dowry; and (4) such cruelty or harassment occurred soon before her death.

The Court was equally clear that "soon before" resists a fixed definition. It is, in the Court's words, "a relative term" that depends on the circumstances of each case, with no straitjacket formula for how many days, weeks, or months qualify — what matters is a "proximity test": whether the interval between the cruelty and the death is close enough that a reasonable link between the two can be drawn, rather than the cruelty having faded into an unrelated, distant past by the time death occurred.

Chetram Verma v. State of U.P.: The Supreme Court Applies Section 118 BSA Directly

The presumption's force under the new Act was demonstrated starkly in Chetram Verma v. State of U.P., decided on 9 February 2026 by a bench of J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan, JJ. Sushma, aged 22, married Devraj on 1 March 2025, reportedly with a dowry of ₹3.5 lakh. Three months later, on 25 April 2025, she was found dead at her matrimonial home in the early hours of the morning; the postmortem confirmed death by strangulation. Her father's FIR alleged sustained cruelty and harassment over dowry demands throughout the marriage. Devraj was charged under Sections 80(2) (dowry death) and 85 (cruelty by husband or relatives) of the BNS, but the Allahabad High Court granted him bail in October 2025, weighing the time already spent in custody and the absence of a prior criminal record.

The Supreme Court vacated that bail order in terms unusually severe for an appellate bail ruling, describing it as "one of the most shocking and disappointing orders" the bench had encountered. The Court held that the High Court had mechanically applied ordinary bail considerations — custody period, clean antecedents — while ignoring what the case actually required: the gravity of a strangulation death occurring within months of marriage in an isolated matrimonial setting, the severity of the punishment attached to Section 80(2) BNS, and, centrally, the Section 118 BSA presumption itself, which the Court held demands heightened scrutiny at the bail stage precisely because it shifts the evidentiary burden onto the accused once its conditions appear satisfied. Devraj was ordered to surrender immediately for an expedited trial.

Worked Example: Applying the Four Conditions

A woman dies of burn injuries at her matrimonial home fourteen months into her marriage. Her family produces letters and witness testimony showing repeated demands from her husband and in-laws for additional dowry in the two months preceding her death, along with evidence of physical assault roughly three weeks before she died. Applying Kaliyaperumal's four conditions: the death falls within the seven-year window (condition 1, via Section 80 BNS); cruelty by the husband and in-laws is shown through the letters and witnesses (condition 2); that cruelty is explicitly tied to dowry demands, not general marital friction (condition 3); and the assault three weeks before death satisfies the proximity test for "soon before" on these facts (condition 4). All four conditions being met, Section 118 requires the court to presume the accused caused the dowry death — shifting to the defence the burden of producing evidence to rebut that presumption, rather than leaving the prosecution to affirmatively prove causation from scratch.

Why the Presumption Exists: The Matrimonial Home as an Evidentiary Black Box

Section 118's mandatory structure is not an accident of drafting — it responds to a specific, well-documented evidentiary problem. Dowry deaths overwhelmingly occur inside the matrimonial home, where the accused's own family members are typically the only people present, the woman's natal family has no independent access to what happened in the days or weeks before her death, and the physical scene itself is under the control of the very people under suspicion. Before 1986, prosecutions under the ordinary law of homicide routinely failed for want of direct proof of causation, even where extensive evidence of dowry-related cruelty existed, because circumstantial evidence of a hostile pattern was treated as insufficient to establish that the accused caused the death rather than the woman having died by accident or her own hand. Section 113B IEA — and now Section 118 BSA — responds to that structural imbalance directly: once cruelty, its dowry connection, and its proximity to death are independently proved, the law no longer requires the prosecution to additionally reconstruct the precise mechanism of causation from a scene it had no access to observe.

Distinguishing Section 118 from the Standalone Cruelty Offence

Section 118 is frequently pleaded in the same trial as, but must be kept analytically distinct from, the standalone offence of cruelty by a husband or his relatives under Section 85 BNS (the successor to the former Section 498A IPC). Section 85 criminalises cruelty itself, including conduct likely to drive a woman to suicide or grave injury, and does not require that she have died at all. Section 118, by contrast, presumes causation of death specifically, and only within a prosecution where a death has already occurred and dowry-connected cruelty preceding it has been shown. In practice, the same body of evidence — witness testimony about harassment, dowry demand letters, prior domestic-violence complaints — is often led to establish both: the standalone cruelty offence where the woman survived earlier incidents, and the Section 118 presumption once the pattern culminated in her death. A prosecutor who conflates the two risks under-proving the death-specific elements Section 118 actually requires by relying on evidence that only speaks to general cruelty; conversely, a defence that only rebuts the cruelty allegation without addressing proximity to death has not fully answered the presumption.

Why This Matters in Practice

For prosecutors, Section 118 remains one of the most consequential presumptions in the Act precisely because dowry deaths typically occur behind closed doors, within the matrimonial home, with the accused's own family often the only witnesses — direct proof of causation is rarely available, and the presumption exists to prevent that structural evidentiary gap from producing routine acquittals. For the defence, Kaliyaperumal's four-part test remains the primary avenue for contesting the presumption's application — particularly on whether alleged cruelty was genuinely dowry-connected and whether it falls within a "soon before" window on the specific facts, rather than disputing the presumption's existence outright. For courts at the bail stage specifically, Chetram Verma is now the standing instruction that Section 118's presumption is a factor demanding real weight, not a technicality to be set aside in favour of routine custody-and-antecedents bail reasoning.

Key Takeaways

1. Section 118 BSA reproduces Section 113B IEA (inserted 1986) without substantive change, updating only the Explanation's cross-reference from IPC Section 304B to BNS Section 80.
2. Kaliyaperumal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2003) 8 SCC 749, sets out the four conditions that must all be independently proved: a dowry death in question, cruelty by the accused, dowry-connected cruelty, and cruelty "soon before" death, assessed by proximity rather than a fixed period.
3. The presumption is mandatory ("shall presume") but rebuttable — once its four conditions are established, the burden shifts to the accused to rebut causation.
4. Chetram Verma v. State of U.P. (9 February 2026) shows the Supreme Court applying Section 118 BSA directly, vacating a High Court bail order for failing to give the presumption adequate weight at the bail stage.
5. Section 118 operates only within an already-pending dowry death question under Section 80 BNS — it does not itself define or expand the substantive offence.

Conclusion

Section 118 is the second of Chapter VII's presumptions this run has covered, and the first to show the new Act's provisions already generating fresh Supreme Court authority barely a year after commencement. The chapter continues backward to Section 117 next — the presumption as to abetment of suicide by a married woman, a closely related but analytically distinct provision that is frequently pleaded alongside Section 118 in the same matrimonial-cruelty prosecutions.