A redevelopment dispute over a Tardeo property that has already travelled through a Single Judge, a Division Bench and the Supreme Court is still not close to a final decision on its merits, after the Bombay High Court refused to decide it on summary judgment and sent it instead for a full trial. Manas Shelters Private Limited had sued Vivek Madhavlal Pittie over the development arrangement for C.S. No. 321, Tardeo Division, Pathe Baburao Marg, Mumbai, after the original owner terminated the arrangement on 16 July 2013, alleging that Manas had failed to perform its contractual obligations.
Manas did not accept that termination and fought it for over a decade on more than one front before this suit reached the stage at which it is now. It first obtained interim protection restraining the owner from dealing with the property, protection that the Single Judge eventually vacated on 27 March 2024. A Division Bench dismissed Manas's appeal against that vacation on 24 June 2025, and the Supreme Court dismissed its special leave petition on 19 February 2026, closing off every avenue by which Manas could keep the interim injunction alive.
With the injunction gone, Manas turned to the underlying suit itself and sought summary judgment and judgment on admissions, asking the Court to declare the 2013 termination illegal outright and to decree in its favour Rs 31,10,00,449 with interest, without putting the dispute through a trial. Summary judgment under Order XIII-A of the Code of Civil Procedure, as applicable to commercial suits, is available only where the defendant has no real prospect of successfully defending the claim, a fairly high threshold meant to weed out suits where a trial would serve no purpose.
The Court held that this suit cleared no such threshold. It reasoned that Manas's own litigation history undercut its position: a party that could not even maintain a prima facie case for continuing interim protection through three rounds of litigation was in a weak position to claim that the opposing side had no real prospect of defending the suit on its merits. The Court set out the applicable test as being whether, in the interest of justice, the dispute is better suited to a full trial where evidence can be weighed and witness credibility assessed, rather than decided on affidavits and admissions alone.
Four distinct issues, in the Court's assessment, each required that kind of evidentiary weighing: whether the termination of the development arrangement was lawful or not, whether Manas was in fact ready and willing to perform its obligations under that arrangement, whether any loss actually flowed from the termination, and whether the quantum of Rs 31.10 crore claimed as damages bears any demonstrable relationship to an actual loss suffered. None of those questions could be resolved by looking at the pleadings and the admitted documents alone, which is precisely the kind of case Order XIII-A is not meant to shortcut.
Pittie's resistance to the summary judgment application was helped, on the Court's reasoning, by Manas's own inability to show a real likelihood of success at the interim stage, a point the Court treated as relevant to the Order XIII-A inquiry even though the injunction and the summary judgment application raise formally distinct questions. A litigant who has lost at every interlocutory stage does not automatically lose the main suit, but the Court was unwilling to say the opposing side had no real prospect of defending it either.
For commercial litigants weighing whether to apply for summary judgment under Order XIII-A rather than proceed straight to trial, the order is a reminder that a damages claim running into tens of crores, resting on disputed facts about performance and causation, is a poor candidate for summary disposal regardless of how strong the underlying legal argument on termination might look on paper. Developers and counterparties in long-running redevelopment disputes should expect that a history of failed interim applications will weigh against them when they later ask a commercial court to shortcut the trial altogether.