Consider almost any economic offence FIR and you will often come across the same pairing: Sections 420 and 406 IPC [now Sections 318 and 316 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS)]. The instinct is easy to understand. Money has gone missing, a client feels wronged, so both provisions go into the complaint and the court is left to sort out which one holds. But the two do not sit together as comfortably as is oft assumed. Everything turns on one question: when did the dishonesty arrive?
Cheating is a crime of the doorstep. The lie comes first. The accused talks the complainant into parting with property by a deception practised at the very outset, so the dishonest mind is already there at the moment of delivery; indeed, it is what brings the delivery about.
Criminal breach of trust is a crime of the afterwards. It starts with a perfectly lawful entrustment – property handed over willingly, for a proper purpose, to someone entitled to hold it – and the dishonesty surfaces only later, when that person turns it to their own use. No lie at the threshold; the wrong is in what comes after.
So, the guilty mind sits at opposite ends of the same timeline and that is the whole reason the two cannot rest on one set of facts. Meant to cheat from the start? Then there was never a real entrustment to breach; the handing over was itself procured by fraud. A genuine entrustment? Then nobody was deceived into parting with anything, so there was nothing to cheat. The Supreme Court of India calls the relationship antithetical and the word fits.