Mihir Prakash Bajoria went to the trial court at Alipore asking it to stop his wife, Vidushi Jain Bajoria, from pursuing a divorce petition she had filed in a court in the United Kingdom. He got what he wanted at first. The Alipore court passed an ex parte anti-suit injunction on 1 November 2025, restraining her from continuing the UK proceedings. She challenged that order before the Calcutta High Court, which set it aside. The husband then carried the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing that an Indian marriage, solemnised and governed by Indian matrimonial law, entitled him to keep the dispute before an Indian court and to stop his wife from litigating it anywhere else.
The Supreme Court was not persuaded. An anti-suit injunction restrains a party from pursuing proceedings in a foreign court, and the Bench of Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and N.V. Anjaria repeated what Indian courts have said for decades: this is not a routine remedy available for the asking merely because an Indian court could also take up the dispute. It is granted sparingly, and only where the foreign forum chosen by the other side is shown to be oppressive or vexatious, or where continuing there would be so inconvenient and unjust that no court exercising its discretion properly could allow it. Parallel jurisdiction between an Indian court and a foreign one is not by itself a ground for an injunction against the foreign proceeding.
On the facts, the Bench found nothing oppressive or vexatious about the wife litigating in London. The couple had spent much of their married life there, and their matrimonial home was in the United Kingdom. That made the UK a natural forum for the wife to seek a divorce, whatever the place of the marriage ceremony in India. The husband's argument that the Hindu Marriage Act and an Indian wedding automatically pulled the dispute back to an Indian court, and kept it there to the exclusion of any other forum, did not hold up against that residence history.
The Court was also critical of how the trial court had reasoned its way to the ex parte injunction in the first place. The Alipore court had anticipated how the UK proceedings were likely to end and had worried that a resulting foreign decree might later run into trouble if it needed to be recognised in India. The Supreme Court treated that as putting the cart before the horse. Whether a foreign divorce decree can be recognised in India is tested under Section 13 of the Code of Civil Procedure only once such a decree actually exists, against the specific findings that decree records. A speculative view of what a foreign court might decide, taken before it has decided anything, is not a sound basis for stopping that court from deciding the case at all.
Having found no error in the Calcutta High Court's approach, the Supreme Court dismissed the husband's appeal and let the order lifting the injunction stand, which means the wife's UK proceedings may continue. The Bench was careful to keep the ruling narrow. It expressed no view on what any eventual order of the UK court might say, or on whether such an order, once passed, would stand up to scrutiny in India if either party sought to rely on it or resist it here. Those questions, the Court said, remain open for whoever raises them, at the stage when there is an actual foreign decree to examine rather than a forecast of one.
For NRI couples and their lawyers, the ruling draws a sharper line around a remedy that has sometimes been used, or attempted, as a way to freeze a spouse's foreign proceedings while a parallel Indian case runs. Simply holding an Indian marriage certificate, or being able to point to an Indian court with jurisdiction under matrimonial law, will not get an anti-suit injunction off the ground. A party seeking one has to show the foreign forum itself is unfair to litigate in, not merely that an Indian court is also available and preferred.