In a recent case of State of Madhya Pradesh v. Ramji Lal Sharma[1], the Apex Court held as follows:

"Once it has been established and proved by the prosecution that all the accused came at the place of incident with a common intention to kill the deceased and as such, they shared the common intention, in that case it is immaterial whether any of the accused who shared the common intention had used any weapon or not and/or any of them caused any injury on the deceased or not.”[2]

Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code mentions “in furtherance of the common intention” and keeping that in mind, it is strictly understood that anything done in order to exercise a common intention can be covered under the purview of Section 34. Section 34 is not a penalizing provision; it is rather looked at as a rule of evidence and it is used in cases where several persons are accused of an offence. This provision is applicable in cases where joint liability or vicarious liability needs to be proved.

When we interpret “in furtherance of”, we relate to any act or gesture which has contributed towards the commission of the offence accused of. Section 34 talks about “common intention” whereas “intention” is not defined anywhere in the Indian Penal Code. There have been interpretations of participants in common intention on a case-to-case basis. Barendra Kumar Ghose v. King Emperor[3] is one of the earliest and well-noted cases where the person was convicted for murder under Section 302 read with Section 34 even though he was just a spectator of the entire crime being committed. This case is still used as a landmark judgment in the view of Section 34. Section 34 is designed to deal with a situation in which it might be hard to differentiate between the criminal acts of individual party members acting in favour of a common intention of all, or to prove precisely what part each of them took.[4]

When an offence is committed with the participation of several persons out of which not a single person attempts to prevent the offence from being committed, all of them are to be found jointly liable for the act because encouragement also adds to the intention. However, a combined reading of the Sections 101 to 104 of the Indian Evidence Act clearly suggests that the burden of proof always lies on the prosecution. Even though there has been a common intention, it is the duty of the prosecution to prove it and bring it before the eyes of law. All in all, Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code acts as a rule of evidence which further needs to be proved through evidence in order to hold the accused persons jointly liable.