In Rajia Begum v. Barnali Mukherjee, the Supreme Court addressed a threshold question that arbitration practitioners run into more often than the tidy world of arbitration textbooks would suggest: what happens when one party alleges that the arbitration agreement itself — not just the underlying contract — is a forgery? The Court held that such a dispute is simply not capable of being resolved through arbitration at all.
The reasoning follows from first principles of consent. Arbitration is a creature of agreement — the tribunal's entire jurisdiction derives from the parties having actually agreed to arbitrate. If the very existence of that agreement is credibly disputed on grounds of forgery, there is no valid consent for a tribunal to draw its authority from, and the doctrine of kompetenz-kompetenz (which lets a tribunal rule on its own jurisdiction) cannot be stretched to let a tribunal validate the very document that is alleged to be fabricated.
This connects to a broader, ongoing conversation in Indian arbitration law about the limits of kompetenz-kompetenz. Section 16 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 does empower a tribunal to rule on its own jurisdiction, including objections to the existence or validity of the arbitration agreement — but that provision has always been understood to presume a minimally genuine document exists for the tribunal to interpret. Forgery allegations attack that baseline premise directly, which is why courts have consistently treated them as falling outside even the generous scope of Section 16, rather than as just another jurisdictional objection a tribunal can resolve in the ordinary course. The Court's ruling here is a reaffirmation of that line, applied to a fact pattern where the forgery allegation was specific and credible enough to require judicial, rather than arbitral, determination.
This is a narrow but important carve-out. It does not open the door to routine 'the contract is fake' arguments as a way of avoiding arbitration — courts will still scrutinise forgery allegations for genuineness before declining to refer a matter to arbitration on this ground, and a bare, unsubstantiated assertion of forgery raised purely to delay a reference will not succeed. But where forgery of the arbitration clause is credibly and specifically pleaded — supported by, for instance, expert handwriting or signature analysis, or clear documentary inconsistency — referring parties will need to be prepared for the forgery question itself to be tried in court, not before the very tribunal whose authority is in dispute.