High Point Supply Company, a US distributor, held exclusive rights to sell a colostrum based nutrition product across North America, sourced from Agati Healthcare, a Navi Mumbai manufacturer, under a distribution agreement running through June 2026. The arrangement came under strain after the brand on the product's US side was acquired by Glanbia Nutritionals. High Point's case was that Agati then started supplying the same product directly to Glanbia, bypassing High Point's exclusivity, before terminating the distribution agreement itself.
The distributor sued Agati in the trial court seeking an injunction against the continuing breach along with consequential monetary relief, and asked for urgent interim protection without first going through the pre-institution mediation that Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act otherwise makes mandatory for commercial suits. Section 12A carries a built-in exception for suits that contemplate urgent interim relief, letting a plaintiff skip mediation and go straight to court where genuine urgency exists, and High Point's suit was framed to fall within that exception.
That characterisation failed at the trial court stage. The judge rejected the plaint under Order VII Rule 11(d) of the Code of Civil Procedure, reasoning that High Point's claim was really for quantifiable monetary damages dressed up with an injunction, and separately noting that High Point had not moved with the urgency its own pleadings claimed, since some time had passed between Agati's termination notice and the suit being filed. On that combined reasoning, the suit was held non-maintainable for want of prior mediation.
High Point appealed, and the Division Bench of Justices R.I. Chagla and Farhan P. Dubash took a materially narrower view of what a trial court is supposed to examine at this threshold stage. The judgment holds that when deciding whether the Section 12A urgency exception applies, a court's inquiry is a limited jurisdictional one, confined to whether the plaint on its face makes out a case for urgent interim relief, and that this inquiry must not slide into evaluating the probability of actually granting that relief or testing the underlying merits of the dispute. Conflating the Section 12A threshold question with the full triple test ordinarily applied to interim injunctions, the Bench held, puts the cart before the horse.
On the monetary relief point, the Bench held that seeking consequential damages alongside an injunction does not convert a suit into one for purely compensable money claims falling outside the urgent relief exception; what matters is whether the injunctive relief sought is itself urgent, not whether money is also claimed as a consequence of the same breach. And on delay, the judgment holds that a plaintiff's having waited before suing does not by itself defeat a claim of genuine urgency where the underlying breach is a continuing one, since a continuing contractual violation can make relief urgent at the time of filing regardless of how long the breach had already been running.
Applying that framework, the Bench set aside the trial court's rejection of the plaint, restored High Point's suit, and sent the interim injunction application itself back to the trial court to be decided on its own merits, a different and later stage of analysis from the threshold question the appeal had actually been about. The distinction the judgment draws, between asking whether a plaint makes out urgency on its face and asking whether that urgency should translate into an actual injunction, is squarely what had gone wrong in the trial court's order.
For commercial litigants structuring a suit around the Section 12A urgency exception, the ruling confirms that pleading a continuing breach and seeking an injunction against it should survive the mediation threshold even where the practical remedy, if granted, would substantially amount to compensating a monetary loss, and even where some time elapsed between the breach becoming apparent and the suit being filed. Defendants hoping to knock out a suit at the Order VII Rule 11 stage by arguing the plaintiff really just wants money, or waited too long to call anything urgent, will now have to contend with a Division Bench ruling that treats both arguments as properly belonging to the interim relief hearing itself, not to the threshold mediation question.