“The conspirators invariably deliberately, plan and act in secret over a period of time.

It
is not necessary that each one of them must have actively participated in the
commission of the offence or was involved in it from start to finish. What is important is
that they were involved in the conspiracy or in other words, there is a combination by
agreement, which may be expression or implied or in part implied…” Firozuddin
Basheeruddin and others vs. State of Kerala, 2001 SCC (Crl) 1341.

“The essential ingredients of the offence of criminal conspiracy are: (i) an agreement
between two or more persons; (ii) the agreement must relate to doing or causing to be
done either (a) an illegal act; or (b) an act which is not illegal in itself but is done by
illegal means. It is, therefore, plain that meeting of minds of two or more persons for
doing or causing to be done an illegal act or an act by illegal means is sine qua non of
criminal conspiracy. – Rajiv Kumar v. State of U.P., (2017) 8 SCC 791

Also, in the case of State of Maharashtra & Ors. v. Som Nath Thapa &Ors., (1996) 4
SCC 659, it was observed that:

“for a person to conspire with another, he must have knowledge of what the co-
conspirators were wanting to achieve and thereafter having the intent to further the
illegal act takes recourse to a course of conduct to achieve the illegal end or facilitate its
accomplishment.”

It has never been easy to get direct evidence for proving an offence under Section 120-
A, which defines criminal conspiracy. Considering this fact, Section 10 of the Indian
Evidence Act comes into play. This section can be divided into two parts: firstly where
there is reasonable ground to believe that two or more persons have conspired to
commit an offence or an actionable wrong. Only when this condition precedent is
satisfied, the second part of the section comes into operation i.e. anything said, done or
written by any one of such persons in reference to the common intention after the time
when such intention was first entertained by any one of them is a relevant fact against
each of the persons believed to be so conspiring as well for the purpose of proving the
existence of the conspiracy. It is therefore necessary that a prima facie case of
conspiracy has to be established for application of Section 10. The second part of
section permits the use of evidence which otherwise could not be used against the
accused person. Sardar Sardul Singh Caveeshar v. State of Maharashtra [(1964) 2
SCR 378], is an authority on this issue.