The situation
Imagine a person whose fundamental right has been violated by an authority whose decision-making chain runs across two or three States — a licence refused by a regulator headquartered in one State, a service order passed by a head office in another, or an administrative decision that affects a citizen resident in a third. When that person files a writ petition before a particular High Court, a common defence raised by the respondent authority is that the petitioner has chosen an inconvenient or inappropriate forum, and that the case ought to be litigated where the authority is based, or where its principal records lie. Courts have now had to repeatedly explain why this private-law objection — imported from cross-border commercial litigation — does not travel comfortably into constitutional writ jurisdiction.
What happened
According to a recent report on Verdictum, a court considering a writ petition addressed precisely this argument: that the doctrine of forum non conveniens should bar the petitioner from pursuing the matter in the forum chosen, because a more convenient forum existed elsewhere. The ruling held that this doctrine rarely applies once writ jurisdiction has been properly invoked — that is, once the petitioner has shown that at least part of the cause of action arose within the territorial jurisdiction of the court approached, and that a public-law wrong (as opposed to a purely private contractual dispute) is being remedied. The exact facts and the precise coram are not restated here since only the doctrinal point, not the specific case citation, can be confirmed from available reporting; the analysis below explains the settled constitutional principles that such rulings apply and build upon.
The law behind it
The starting point is Article 226 of the Constitution, which empowers every High Court to issue directions, orders or writs — including habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari — to any person or authority, including the government, for the enforcement of fundamental rights and "for any other purpose". Crucially, Article 226 confines this power territorially: a High Court may exercise it where the person or authority against whom the writ is sought is located within its jurisdiction, or where the cause of action, wholly or in part, arises within its territorial limits. This second limb — the "cause of action" test — is what usually decides forum disputes in writ matters, and it is a statutory-cum-constitutional test, not a discretionary balancing exercise of convenience.
Article 32 supplies the parallel remedy at the level of the Supreme Court, guaranteeing the right to move that Court directly for enforcement of fundamental rights and describing this right itself as one of the fundamental rights. Because Article 32 confers an original, not merely appellate, jurisdiction directly tied to Part III of the Constitution, forum objections have even less purchase there: a petitioner alleging breach of a fundamental right by the Union or any authority across India may approach the Supreme Court regardless of where the petitioner resides or where the immediate order was passed, subject to the Court's own practice.
Why does forum non conveniens — a doctrine that allows a court to decline jurisdiction it otherwise possesses because another forum is more appropriate for the parties and the interests of justice — struggle to apply to writ courts? The answer lies in the character of the jurisdiction itself. Articles 226 and 32 are not ordinary civil jurisdiction created by statute for private disputes between parties of equal standing; they are constitutional remedies against the State and public authorities, rooted in the supremacy of fundamental rights under Article 19 and Article 21, among others. The legislative competence that permits Parliament and State legislatures to define ordinary civil jurisdiction, distribution of subjects, and procedural law is found in Article 245 and Article 246, but writ jurisdiction under Article 226 stands outside that ordinary legislative architecture — it is conferred directly by the Constitution and cannot be curtailed by an ordinary statute, nor easily displaced by a private-law convenience doctrine that developed to manage inter-State or international commercial litigation between private parties.
There is also the binding-precedent dimension. Under Article 141, the law declared by the Supreme Court binds all courts within India. Where the Supreme Court has settled that territorial jurisdiction for writs is determined by the cause-of-action test and not by a free-standing convenience inquiry, every High Court is bound to apply that settled position, and cannot substitute its own view of what forum would be more convenient for the litigants once the jurisdictional facts (part of cause of action arising within the State) are established.
How we got here
Forum non conveniens is a doctrine with common-law, largely private-international-law origins: it lets a court that technically has jurisdiction over a dispute decline to exercise it because another available forum is clearly more suitable, considering the location of parties, witnesses, evidence and the general interests of justice. Indian courts have recognised and applied it chiefly in civil suits with cross-border or multi-State private elements — commercial contracts, torts, and family law disputes where more than one court could technically try the matter. Over the decades, as writ litigation grew — service disputes against pan-India public sector employers, environmental and regulatory matters, and challenges to central government notifications — respondents increasingly sought to import the same convenience-based objection into writ proceedings, arguing that petitioners were forum-shopping by approaching a High Court favourable to them rather than the High Court closest to the decision-making authority. Indian constitutional courts have consistently pushed back, holding that once the jurisdictional threshold under Article 226 is met — a part of the cause of action having arisen within the territorial limits of the court — the petitioner's choice of forum is a matter of right, not grace, and cannot be defeated merely because the respondent finds a different forum more convenient for itself.
What it means in practice
For an ordinary litigant, this has real consequences. If a person is affected by an administrative order and any component of that decision — communication of the order, its implementation, or an act or omission causing injury — occurs within the territorial jurisdiction of a particular High Court, that person retains the right to approach that High Court, even if the authority's head office, records, or principal place of business lies elsewhere. Public authorities cannot use the forum non conveniens argument as a routine tactic to shift inconvenient litigation to a friendlier or more distant bench. This is particularly significant for citizens challenging central government policies, national regulators, or pan-India employers, where the decision may originate in Delhi but its effect is felt in a petitioner's home State.
For law students and judiciary and UPSC aspirants, the key takeaway is definitional precision: forum non conveniens is a discretionary, convenience-based doctrine developed for private civil litigation; the cause-of-action test under Article 226 is a jurisdictional, rights-based test rooted in the Constitution. The two should not be conflated, and any answer discussing writ jurisdiction should anchor the analysis in Article 226's own territorial language rather than treating it as a subset of ordinary civil procedure. Aspirants should also be alert to the distinction between Article 226 (High Court, territorial, wider "any other purpose" ambit) and Article 32 (Supreme Court, fundamental rights only, no comparable territorial limitation in the same sense).
What to watch
Because forum objections recur constantly in service law, environmental litigation, and challenges to central schemes, further judicial clarification on the precise boundaries of the cause-of-action test — for instance, how much of the cause of action must arise within a jurisdiction, and whether mere receipt of an adverse communication suffices — remains an active and evolving area. Readers should watch for future rulings, especially from the Supreme Court, that further calibrate when, if ever, convenience-based considerations may legitimately inform a writ court's discretion to decline relief, as distinct from its jurisdiction to entertain the petition in the first place. Until then, the settled position remains that forum non conveniens is the exception, not the rule, in constitutional writ litigation.