In India as far as Commercial Disputes are concerned, procedure is something which is meant to make adjudication of a case orderly fair and predictable. Talking about Commercial Disputes and in particular on Commercial Litigation, some of the procedural requirements in the recent year are made into a pressure instrument, where a party may not seek to succeed on their merits, on their facts of the case or the law involved but it also seeks to make the process of litigation and commercial disputes so costly, so lengthy, so uncertain that most of the time a genuine party with a legitimate claim is forced to settle and give up the legitimate claim or take a bad deal This particular phenomenon can be called a “Weaponization of Commercial Disputes and Commercial Procedure in India.”
In 1977, Justice Krishna Iyer described a certain type of litigant in language that has outlasted almost every procedural amendment since: a party engaged in the "pathology of litigative addiction," dressing up a hopeless case in a "cleverly drafted" plaint and gambling on a court too rushed to notice. That was T. Arivandandam v. T.V. Satyapal (1977).
Very nearly fifty years later, in July 2026, the Supreme Court found itself doing something structurally identical in Levitate Mobile Technologies v. Standard Chartered Bank — refusing a plaintiff's attempt, more than a decade into a commercial suit, to reopen the evidentiary stage by producing documents piecemeal. The vocabulary had changed. The underlying behaviour had not.
That continuity is the right starting point for any serious study of “weaponised procedure” in Indian commercial litigation. It is easy to see the phenomenon as a gap in the law, as if Indian courts had simply failed to see that litigants misuse pleadings, injunctions, adjournments and appeals to outlast rather than out-argue their opponents. The record says something else. Indian courts have developed one of the more elaborate bodies of doctrine anywhere against exactly this sort of thing. The puzzle is why that doctrine, developed and restated over five decades, has not changed the underlying incentive to delay.
A jurisprudence built one abuse at a time
A closer look shows the case law to be less a doctrine than a series of individual discoveries. Arivandandam (supra) was concerned with frivolous pleadings and directed trial courts to strike down such pleadings under Order VII Rule 11 instead of allowing a bogus cause of action to crawl to trial. Twenty years later, K.K. Modi v. K.N. Modi (1998) dealt with a totally different kind of abuse: a suit which raised substantially the same issues as were pending in an arbitration reference. The Court ruled that this was an abuse of the process of the court and extended the logic of Arivandandam (supra) from bad pleadings to multiplicity of proceedings without ever citing it for that proposition.
Another case of Salem Advocate Bar Association v. Union of India (2005) addressed a third problem, courts that had ceded control of a suit's pace to the parties and answered it by mandating active case management and reference to mediation under Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure.
Then, in 2011, two further judgments, months apart, concerned two further discrete abuses. In Ramrameshwari Devi v. Nirmala Devi, the court held that the courts must impose “actual, realistic” costs so that the wrongdoers do not profit by frivolous litigation. The court cautioned against routine grant of ex parte interim injunctions. Weeks later, Shiv Cotex v. Tirgun Auto Plast,condemned what it called a ‘adjournment culture’, criticizing the ‘misplaced sympathy’ of appellate and revisional courts that permit litigants to breach the three-adjournment ceiling built into Order XVII of the Code. Each of these five judgments is a landmark and is cited routinely even today by subordinate courts. What none of them does is point to the others as examples of one underlying condition. Doctrinally, pleadings, parallel suits, case management, costs and adjournments are treated as five distinct problems, not five symptoms.
Statutory rigidity as an admission of doctrinal failure
The exhortatory approach of Salem Advocate Bar Association(supra) and its predecessors had a decade to work on high-value disputes by the time Parliament enacted the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, without visibly doing so. The Act responded by eliminating, rather than refining, discretion: a written statement not filed within 120 days is simply forfeited, and section 12A makes pre-institution mediation compulsory. In SCG Contracts India v. K.S. Chamankar Infrastructure (2019), the Supreme Court took an unusually strict view of both provisions, holding that the 120-day cap left no residual discretion to condone even a one-day delay, and, in Patil Automation v. Rakheja Engineers (2022), holding that a suit filed in breach of Section 12A could be rejected at the threshold, on the court’s own motion. That severity is itself a data point: it suggests the judiciary had concluded that softer, case-by-case correction of the Arivandandam-to-Shiv Cotex variety was not, on its own, sufficient.
Where doctrine still lags
Even a hard-edged statute leaks at its untouched edges. Rahul S. Shah v. Jinendra Kumar Gandhi (2021) confronted the stage every other judgment in this lineage leaves untouched: execution. The Court held that execution is not "a stage of re-trial," condemned the persistent misuse of the Code to obstruct decree-holders, and directed that execution petitions be disposed of within six months. Four years later, at least one High Court had to warn that continued non-compliance with those very directions would be treated as contempt, a striking illustration that even a specific, dated instruction from the Supreme Court can be absorbed into the culture it targeted, absent an institutional mechanism to enforce it. Levitate Mobile Technologies makes the same point at the trial stage: close the written-statement door tightly enough, and litigants will simply try to prise open the evidentiary one instead.
What the pattern reveals
Read together, these authorities converge on a single explanation that none of them fully generalises. Ramrameshwari Devi (supra) said it most plainly in 2011, Indian courts do not impose costs that reflect real prejudice, so litigants have no economic reason to stop obstructing. Fifteen years of subsequent doctrine, a stricter cap on adjournments, a mandatory mediation threshold, a forfeiture rule for late written statements, a six-month execution timeline , has treated each stage of a suit as requiring its own bespoke fix, without ever generalising the costs insight that explains why litigants target whichever stage remains cheapest to abuse. That is the doctrinal fragmentation this article set out to identify: not an absence of judicial recognition, which is abundant, but an absence of a unifying enforcement principle running across pleadings, injunctions, adjournments, mediation, evidence and execution alike.
A coherent response would not require another landmark judgment isolating a sixth procedural pressure point. It would require treating Ramrameshwari Devi's costs principle as the organising logic for all the others , quantified against actual prejudice at every interlocutory stage, not reserved for final disposal — so that delay stops being the cheapest strategy available to a litigant with a weak case. Indian courts have diagnosed this pathology, accurately and repeatedly, since 1977. They have not yet treated it as one disease rather than a new symptom each time it resurfaces.
Conclusion
The Weaponization of procedure reveals that delay in Indian commercial litigation is not merely an administrative problem but may become a deliberate source of strategic and economic advantage. Although procedural safeguards are essential to protect fairness, their repetitive and purposeless invocation can frustrate adjudication, increase litigation costs and undermine confidence in the justice system. The challenge is therefore to maintain a careful balance between expedition and due process.