A Singapore company that agreed to arbitrate its disputes in Singapore might expect an Indian court to have nothing to say about those disputes until the arbitral tribunal has ruled. The Karnataka High Court has now confirmed, in a dispute between Aroha Labs Pte. Ltd. and a group of former consultants, that this expectation is wrong where interim relief is concerned.
Aroha Labs, a Singapore-based technology company, had entered into master service agreements with a set of independent consultants between May 2024 and November 2025 to build several software applications, including an astrology app called Astro 247. A dispute later arose over who actually owned the applications once the working relationship broke down. A related Indian company, Creato Club Private Limited, was incorporated along the way, and Aroha Labs alleged that Creato Club began asserting ownership over the applications and went so far as to file a civil suit against Aroha and its directors before the Bangalore Civil Courts.
The underlying commercial agreements provided for arbitration seated in Singapore under the Singapore International Arbitration Centre's rules. Aroha Labs nonetheless approached the Karnataka High Court under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, seeking interim protection, specifically restraining the former consultants and the entities linked to Creato Club from dealing with the disputed applications while the Singapore arbitration ran its course.
Justice M.G.S. Kamal held that choosing a foreign seat does not, by itself, oust Indian courts' jurisdiction to grant such interim relief. The proviso to Section 2(2) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act lets parties approach an Indian court for interim measures even where the arbitration itself is seated abroad, and the court held that excluding that jurisdiction altogether requires an express agreement between the parties to do so. Nothing in Aroha Labs' arrangements amounted to that kind of express exclusion.
The court partly allowed the petition. It restrained the former consultants, along with two entities allegedly linked to one of them, from dealing with the five disputed software applications, a restraint that continues pending the outcome of the Singapore arbitration. It stopped short of ordering the immediate return of laptops, computers, source code, and other company property at this interim stage, leaving that question for either a later stage of the Section 9 proceedings or for the arbitral tribunal itself to resolve.
The ruling leans on a line of Supreme Court authority that has, over the past several years, steadily narrowed the old assumption that an Indian seat was required before Indian courts could touch an arbitration at all. The Supreme Court's earlier intervention in a dispute involving GE, which set aside a Gujarat High Court view that had denied interim relief purely because the arbitration was foreign-seated, supplied the doctrinal foundation the Karnataka High Court relied on here. Bombay and Delhi High Courts have taken a similar position in their own cases, treating implied exclusion of Part I protections as something that does not follow automatically from a foreign seat.
For parties structuring cross-border agreements with Indian counterparties or Indian-incorporated subsidiaries in the picture, the case is a reminder that a foreign arbitration clause does not insulate assets, data, or intellectual property located in India from an Indian court's reach while arbitration is pending. A party genuinely wanting to exclude Indian courts from any role, including interim relief, needs to say so expressly in the arbitration agreement. Silence on the point, as in Aroha Labs' agreements, leaves the door open for the other side to run straight to an Indian court the moment a dispute over Indian-based assets breaks out.
The result also carries a tactical lesson for whichever side ends up resisting a Section 9 petition in a similar cross-border dispute. Arguing that the foreign seat alone defeats the Indian court's jurisdiction is, after this ruling and the Supreme Court authority it follows, unlikely to succeed on its own. The stronger ground for resisting interim relief lies in showing either an express exclusion clause or that the balance of convenience and the merits do not support the specific protection sought, since the seat-based jurisdictional objection by itself no longer carries the weight it once did before Indian courts.