Section 9 and the Third Party: Can an Indian Court Grant Interim Relief for or Against a Third Party to an Arbitration Agreement?

Author

Adarsh Sahu, Priyansh Shrivastava, Priyanshu Kasliwal and Suvansh Shanker

Abstract

 Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 empowers a court to grant interim measures of protection in aid of arbitration. A question of growing practical importance is whether that power extends to, or can be directed against, a person who is not a signatory to the arbitration agreement. This article addresses that research question directly. Under section 9 of the Ac, the right to invoke the provision is restricted to parties to the arbitration agreement, but the power to grant relief extends beyond them. A court exercising Section 9 jurisdiction may, on appropriate facts, pass interim orders against a third party or in favour of the third party. The article traces the judicial reasoning supporting this position from Prabhat Steel Traders and Blue Coast Hotels to the landmark K. Bala Vishnu Raju decision of the Telangana High Court examines the restrictive view represented by Gulshan Townplanners, and proposes a structured framework for determining when and how Section 9 relief may legitimately reach beyond the signature block.

Keywords

Section 9, interim relief, third party, non-signatory, party-indifferent power, arbitration agreement, Section 17, K. Bala Vishnu Raju.

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The research question, whether an interim measure under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 can be passed for or against a third party or non-signatory to an arbitration agreement  admits of a qualified but definite affirmative answer.

Section 9 is structurally asymmetric. The right to invoke it is reserved for parties to the arbitration agreement. But the power it confers on the court is not bounded in the same way. The statutory text, the sub-clauses of Section 9(1), and the fundamental distinction between the court's statutory jurisdiction and the tribunal's contractual authority all support the conclusion that a court may pass Section 9 orders against third parties — including banks, escrow agents, parties claiming under signatories, and non-signatories whose conduct reflects intimate and proximate connection to the arbitration agreement.

The restrictive view represented by Gulshan Townplanners identifies the outer limit correctly: a wholly-unconnected third party, against whom even the signatory party could not seek Section 9 relief, cannot be subjected to the court's Section 9 power. But this limit is defined by the quality of the connection, not by the mere absence of a signature on the arbitration agreement.

The decisive insight of K. Bala Vishnu Raju that Section 9’s power is “party-indifferent with regard to the intended respondent” restates the structural asymmetry in its clearest form and should be treated as the authoritative position. Courts should apply it through the graduated framework proposed in this article.

What remains desirable, ultimately, is legislative clarity. A targeted amendment to Section 9, or an authoritative Supreme Court pronouncement specifically addressing the third-party question in the context of interim relief (as distinct from the broader impleadment question addressed in Cox and Kings), would resolve the inconsistency currently exhibited across High Courts and provide the certainty that commercial arbitration demands.

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