An appellant who builds an entire challenge on one argument takes a considerable risk, and that risk caught up with Jagdish Dahyalal Patel before the Delhi High Court. In Jagdish Dahyalal Patel v. Anchor Consumer Products Private Limited, a Division Bench of Justice V. Kameswar Rao and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora dismissed Patel’s appeal against an ex parte ad interim injunction that restrained him from using the mark DYNAFRESH for air fresheners. Patel staked his entire case on a single ground, that Anchor Consumer Products had suppressed forty five GST paid invoices while obtaining the injunction. The Bench rejected that argument comprehensively, and in doing so offered a clean illustration of how far a suppression plea can actually travel when the underlying merits already point the other way.
Two Applications And One Rejection Patel Chose Not To Mention
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Patel’s trouble began well before this suit reached court. He first applied to register DYNAFRESH claiming use of the mark since 29 February 2020, an application the Registrar of Trade Marks refused by order dated 29 July 2024. The Registrar found two separate problems with that application, phonetic and visual similarity to Anchor’s registered mark DYNA, and a user claim that Patel had failed to substantiate with adequate proof. Patel did not appeal that refusal. He also did not disclose it when he filed a second application for the identical mark, this time supported by forty five GST paid invoices meant to establish commercial use.
This sequence matters because it framed everything that followed. Anchor holds registration over DYNA for soaps and personal care products going back to 1999, a mark it has used continuously and built considerable goodwill around over more than two decades. When Anchor discovered Patel selling air fresheners under DYNAFRESH, it filed a commercial suit alleging infringement and passing off, and sought an ex parte ad interim injunction along with the appointment of a Local Commissioner, a step Indian courts routinely take in trademark suits to preserve evidence of infringing stock and packaging before a defendant has any opportunity to move or dispose of it. The Single Judge examined Anchor’s material and granted the injunction on 26 May 2026, restraining Patel from using DYNAFRESH pending further hearing.
Why DYNA And DYNAFRESH Count As Deceptively Similar
Anchor’s case rested on Section 29 of the Trade Marks Act, which asks whether an impugned mark is identical or deceptively similar to a registered mark used for the same or similar goods, and whether that similarity is likely to cause confusion among ordinary consumers. Soaps and personal care products sit close enough to air fresheners in the mind of an average buyer, both are household items typically sold from the same shelves and through the same retail channels, that courts routinely treat them as allied goods for this purpose rather than insisting on an exact match of product category. Adding the suffix FRESH to DYNA does not meaningfully change the phonetic or visual impression the composite mark leaves, since the dominant and distinctive element in both marks remains the word DYNA, and a defendant cannot avoid infringement merely by attaching a descriptive word onto someone else’s established mark. Indian courts since Amritdhara Pharmacy Co. v. Satya Deo Gupta have judged deceptive similarity by the overall impression a mark leaves on a person of average intelligence and imperfect recollection, rather than through a side by side dissection of individual letters or syllables, and that is precisely the lens through which the Registrar examined DYNAFRESH in 2024 and the Single Judge revisited it while granting the injunction.
The Suppression Plea Patel Built His Appeal Around
Patel’s appeal did not challenge the Single Judge’s findings on deceptive similarity, on Anchor’s goodwill, or on whether his adoption of DYNAFRESH showed bad faith. He raised exactly one ground, that Anchor had suppressed the forty five GST paid invoices filed alongside his second trademark application, invoices that purportedly showed he had used DYNAFRESH since June 2021 rather than the more recent date pleaded in Anchor’s suit. If Anchor had indeed hidden evidence pointing to years of prior commercial use by Patel, that omission could plausibly have coloured the Single Judge’s assessment of urgency and of who held the stronger equitable claim.
The Division Bench did not accept that the invoices were suppressed in any meaningful sense. It noted that Anchor had already placed before the Single Judge, through additional documents filed on 26 May 2026, listings showing Patel’s products being sold on Amazon since 2021. The Single Judge was therefore already aware of the timeline Patel wanted to rely on before the ad interim order was passed. A suppression plea built on facts the court already had before it loses most of its force, since the essential premise, that the decision maker acted without knowledge of the relevant material, simply does not hold up.
Registrar’s 2024 Order
Even setting aside whether the invoices were technically before the Single Judge, the Bench held that they would not have changed the outcome regardless. The Registrar’s order refusing Patel’s first application had already recorded, as a quasi judicial finding, that DYNAFRESH conflicted with DYNA and that Patel’s user claim lacked adequate proof. Patel never appealed that finding, which meant it attained finality and stood as a settled determination on exactly the questions his invoices were meant to reopen.
A quasi judicial finding that a party leaves unchallenged carries real weight in later proceedings between the same parties over the same mark. Once the Registrar had already examined and rejected Patel’s claim to have used DYNAFRESH from an even earlier date, without adequate proof, filing invoices covering a later period could not undo that determination. The invoices might have shown some commercial activity, but they could not retroactively cure a user claim the Registrar had already found wanting, nor could they answer the finding of deceptive similarity that formed the core of the refusal. The Bench treated the 2024 order as eclipsing the invoices entirely, since the invoices addressed a symptom while the Registrar’s order had already addressed the underlying disease.
The Bad Faith Finding Attached To The Second Application
What made Patel’s position weaker still was the manner in which he pursued the second application. Rather than appeal the 2024 refusal or otherwise address the Registrar’s concerns, Patel filed a fresh application for the identical mark without disclosing that an earlier application covering the same mark had already been refused on materially the same grounds. The Court described this conduct in strong terms, calling it not bona fide and an attempt to overreach the earlier order. Filing a second application while staying silent about a first refusal is not a neutral administrative step, it reads as an effort to obtain through a fresh filing what the Registrar had already declined to grant, and courts take a dim view of exactly that kind of manoeuvre.
This finding also explains why the suppression plea could never have carried the appeal on its own. Even a genuine act of suppression by Anchor would have had to be weighed against Patel’s own conduct in withholding the 2024 refusal from the Registrar handling his second application. A party asking a court to vacate an injunction on the ground that the other side failed to disclose material facts sits on much weaker ground when that same party has its own undisclosed history working against it.
What This Says About Suppression As A Ground To Vacate An Injunction
Indian courts have long recognised that suppression of material facts can justify vacating an ex parte order, since a party approaching a court for urgent equitable relief is expected to come with clean hands and disclose facts that might reasonably affect the outcome. That principle is well settled and Anchor never disputed it. What this case demonstrates is the limiting condition attached to that principle, the suppressed fact has to be one that would actually have altered the result, not merely one that adds colour or context to the timeline already before the court.
Patel’s invoices, even taken at face value, addressed a question the Registrar had already answered against him through an order he chose not to challenge. A suppression plea cannot function as a backdoor route to relitigate findings that have already attained finality through inaction. The Division Bench effectively asked whether disclosure of the invoices would have changed the Single Judge’s decision, concluded that it would not have, and declined to disturb an injunction resting on solid independent findings regardless of the suppression argument’s technical merits.
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Conclusion
This is the correct outcome, and the reasoning behind it deserves attention from anyone drafting a trademark appeal around a suppression argument. A suppression plea only carries weight when the withheld fact would genuinely have changed the result, and Patel’s own litigation history undercut his argument before it even reached that question. Choosing not to appeal an adverse Registrar finding and then filing an identical application without mentioning that finding is the kind of conduct that invites exactly the scrutiny it received here. The lesson for practitioners runs in both directions, a suppression argument built on facts the court already possessed is unlikely to succeed, and a party who has itself withheld an adverse finding from the Registrar is poorly placed to complain about the other side’s disclosures. The Division Bench kept the suppression doctrine within its proper limits, protecting the integrity of ex parte relief without letting the doctrine become a tool for reopening merits that were never actually in genuine doubt.
