San Nutrition v. Arpit Mangal (2025): influencer product-criticism as protected fair comment

When a nutraceutical company moved the Delhi High Court to take down a clutch of unflattering YouTube and Instagram reviews of its whey-protein product, it was testing one of the most contested faultlines in contemporary Indian speech law: how far a brand can reach for the machinery of defamation and trademark to silence its online critics. In San Nutrition Private Limited v. Arpit Mangal, decided on 28 April 2025, Amit Bansal, J. declined to grant the injunction — and in doing so delivered one of the year's clearest statements that fact-anchored criticism by social-media influencers is protected speech, not actionable disparagement.

The facts in brief

The plaintiff, San Nutrition Private Limited, markets nutraceutical and dietary-supplement products under marks including "DC DOCTOR'S CHOICE" and "DC DOCTOR'S CHOICE ISO PRO", the latter an isolate whey-protein supplement. Four social-media influencers — Arpit Mangal (operating as @AllAboutNutrition), Kabir Grover (@HealthByKilo), Manish Keshwani (@Manishhkeshwani) and Avijit Roy (@COREFITLAB) — had posted reviews on YouTube and Instagram that were sharply critical of the product. Google/YouTube and Meta/Instagram were also impleaded as platform defendants.

The criticism did not rest on bare opinion. One defendant had purchased a sample of the product on Amazon in May 2022 and sent it for independent testing. The reviews drew on accredited-laboratory test reports asserting that the supplement contained substantially less protein, and more carbohydrate, than its label claimed. On the strength of that material, the influencers told their audiences that the product did not deliver what it advertised.

San Nutrition responded with a composite suit, CS(COMM) 420/2024, pleading permanent injunction, trademark infringement, defamation, disparagement and unfair trade practice, and applied for an interim injunction to have the videos taken down pending trial.

The questions

The application raised three questions that the Court had to address at the interlocutory stage. The first was whether the influencers' product-criticism videos were prima facie defamatory or disparaging, or whether they were protected fair comment and free speech under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. The second was whether the defendants' use of the plaintiff's registered marks in their reviews amounted to trademark infringement, or whether it was permissible nominative use — referring to the plaintiff's goods in order to review those very goods. The third, and the one that governed the disposition, was the standard for granting an interim injunction in a defamation suit, where the rule in Bonnard v. Perryman directs that injunctions restraining allegedly defamatory speech are granted only sparingly, particularly where the defendant pleads truth or fair comment.

What the Court held

The Court refused the interim injunction. On the defamation and disparagement plea, Bansal, J. held that the plaintiff had not shown that the defendants' pleaded defences of truth and fair comment were palpably false or bound to fail at trial. The reviews were not idle abuse: they were anchored in objective material — the accredited lab reports — which the plaintiff had not met with any contrary evidence of its own.

From that footing the Court drew the broader principle. Reasonable criticism made in good faith to inform consumers — including vulnerable groups such as diabetics and athletes who rely on the accuracy of nutritional labelling — is protected free speech under Article 19(1)(a) and is prima facie not defamatory. That the criticism was delivered with hyperbole or satire did not strip it of protection; the touchstone was whether the critique was honest comment founded on a factual substratum, not whether it was polite.

On the trademark plea, the Court found no prima facie case of infringement. The defendants had used the plaintiff's marks only to identify and review the plaintiff's own goods — a reviewing or nominative use — and not in the course of trade in competing products. Use of a mark to refer to the very goods it denotes, for the purpose of commenting on them, does not engage the proprietor's exclusive rights in the way the statute targets.

Applying Bonnard v. Perryman, the Court held that the balance of convenience lay with the defendants. An injunction would not merely restrain four reviewers; it would fetter the constitutional guarantee of free speech and deprive the public of health-related information about a product they might ingest.

Analysis

The reasoning in San Nutrition is best understood as the meeting of two well-settled lines of authority brought to bear on a new factual setting. The first is the Bonnard v. Perryman principle, long absorbed into Indian law, that courts are slow to grant pre-trial injunctions against speech where the defendant raises a defence of truth or fair comment; the question of truth is for the trial, and to gag the speaker in the interim is to pre-judge it. The second is the constitutional protection that Article 19(1)(a) extends to criticism, opinion and the free flow of information — a protection that does not evaporate merely because the speech is commercially inconvenient to its subject.

What makes the decision significant is the way Bansal, J. fused these strands into a workable test for the influencer era. The decisive feature was the factual substratum of the criticism. Because the reviews were tethered to accredited lab reports — objective material the plaintiff did not rebut — the defences of truth and fair comment could not be dismissed as hopeless, and the high Bonnard threshold was not crossed. The implicit corollary is just as important: a critic who manufactures allegations from nothing, untethered to any verifiable basis, stands on very different ground. Fair comment is a shield for honest, fact-based critique, not a licence for unfounded vilification.

The trademark holding deserves emphasis because it closes off a common flanking manoeuvre. Brands sometimes reach for infringement claims to suppress criticism that defamation law would protect, on the theory that any display of the mark in a critical video is unauthorised use. The Court's treatment of the reviews as nominative or reviewing use refuses that move: you cannot review a product without naming and showing it, and naming it for that purpose is not trading in it. The mark is being used to point at the goods, not to pass off rival goods, and the proprietor's monopoly does not extend that far.

There is, finally, a consumer-protection dimension that the Court did not treat as incidental. By foregrounding the interests of diabetics and athletes — consumers for whom the accuracy of a protein-and-carbohydrate label is not a trivial matter — the judgment recognises the watchdog role that independent reviewers now play in markets where official enforcement is thin and product claims are easy to make and hard to verify.

Why it matters

San Nutrition v. Arpit Mangal is shaping up as a leading 2025 authority on the limits of brand-protective litigation against online critics. It tells companies that the path of suing reviewers into silence is a narrow one: where the criticism is grounded in objective material and pleaded as truth or fair comment, an interim injunction will not issue, and the dispute must go to trial rather than be resolved by a pre-emptive takedown. It reinforces the high Bonnard v. Perryman threshold for pre-trial speech injunctions in Indian law, and it extends that protection squarely to the medium of YouTube and Instagram product reviews.

For practitioners, the decision repays close reading on both sides of the docket. A brand contemplating action against a critical reviewer must ask, before filing, whether the criticism can be shown to be unsubstantiated — because if it rests on verifiable material the plaintiff has not rebutted, an injunction is unlikely and a trademark dressing-up of the complaint will not help. A reviewer, conversely, learns the value of the evidentiary spine: the protection the Court extended flowed directly from the lab reports, and criticism untethered to such a basis would have invited a very different result. The judgment also slots into the wider Indian free-speech jurisprudence on the relationship between reputation and expression — from Subramanian Swamy upholding criminal defamation while affirming Article 19(1)(a)'s reach, to Shreya Singhal striking down a vaguely drawn restriction on online speech, to LIC v. Manubhai D. Shah recognising the right to inform and reply. San Nutrition carries that tradition into the influencer economy, holding that the consumer's right to honest, evidence-based information about what they buy is itself a value the Constitution protects.

Related on Valkya

• Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India
• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India
• LIC v. Manubhai D. Shah (right of reply)

Sources

• LiveLaw, "San Nutrition Defamation Trademark Infringement Influencers Prima Facie Fair Comment" — https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/delhi-high-court/san-nutrition-defamation-trademark-infringement-influencers-prima-facie-fair-comment-290617
• Verdictum, "San Nutrition Private Limited v. Arpit Mangal, 2025:DHC:2973 — Social Media Influencers" — https://www.verdictum.in/court-updates/high-courts/delhi-high-court/san-nutrition-private-limited-v-arpit-mangal-2025-dhc-2973-social-media-influencers-1575879
• SCC Online Blog, "Delhi High Court Upholds Free Speech in Doctor's Choice Protein Case" — https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2025/04/30/delhi-high-court-upholds-free-speech-in-doctors-choice-protein-case-legal-news/
• Bar & Bench, "Influencers can criticise brands based on facts: Delhi High Court" — https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/influencers-can-criticise-brands-based-on-facts-delhi-high-court