Did the Delhi High Court compromise on doctrine while maximising outcome? Discussing some knotty procedural law, Arshiya Gupta examines DHC’s decision in Shri Surinder Kumar v. Registrar of Copyrights and argues how it collapses a carefully designed special procedural regime in favour of general transfer powers. Arshiya is a third-year law student at National Law University, Delhi, with a keen inclination towards PIL, IPR, and criminal law.
When General Powers Swallow Special Design: A Critique of Surinder Kumar Case of the DHC
By Arshiya Gupta
The decision of the Delhi High Court in Shri Surinder Kumar v. Registrar of Copyrights is, on a very first glance, a pragmatic attempt to curb the multiplicity of proceedings in intellectual property disputes. The Court in this case invokes Section 24 of the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC) to transfer a non-commercial district court suit to the High Court’s IP Division (IPD). By doing this, it affirms a broad supervisory power, that commercial and non-commercial IP disputes can be heard together; parallel proceedings need not be stayed; and consolidation is preferable.
Yet, beneath this efficiency-driven rationale lies a deeper doctrinal issue. The judgment results in the flattening of a carefully constructed procedural architecture, one that deliberately distinguishes between commercial and non-commercial disputes, and more largely, between general procedural powers and special rule-making regimes. Read against the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Iridium India Telecom Ltd v. Motorola Inc. (2005), the DHC order appears less a harmonious interpretation and more an assertion of general power at the cost of a clearly specified special design. This blogpost argues that the Surinder Kumar judgment allows Section 24 CPC to operate as an override to the IPD Rules framed under Section 129 CPC, collapsing a carefully designed special procedural regime in favour of general transfer powers.
The Court’s Reasoning and Core Holding
In the present case, a central objection raised by the Registrar of Copyrights (Respondent) was that the district court suit, being valued below ₹3 lakhs, was pending before a non-commercial court, and therefore could not be transferred or consolidated under Rule 26 of the IPD Rules, 2022, which allows IPD to consolidate IP disputes pending before a Commercial Court. Rejecting this narrow reading, the Court held that Section 24 CPC (which grants general power to a High Court to transfer or withdraw any matter pending before a subordinate court) is a general, stage-agnostic power enabling the High Court to withdraw and transfer any proceeding, commercial or otherwise, to itself to avoid conflicting decisions. It also held that Rule 26 of the IPD Rules does not limit this power, even though it expressly speaks of consolidation of matters pending before Commercial Courts. On this basis, the Court concluded that a non-commercial IP suit, valued below the Commercial Courts threshold, could be transferred and consolidated with a commercial rectification petition before the IPD, without requiring a stay or parallel adjudication.
This conclusion treats Rule 26 as merely facilitative, rather than as a conscious procedural boundary. That move is precisely where the doctrinal difficulty arises.
Problem with the Holding – Analysing Surinder Kumar as per Iridium
In Iridium India Telecom Ltd v. Motorola Inc., the Supreme Court confronted a classic conflict, that of general CPC provisions versus High Court Original Side Rules framed under Section 129 CPC. The Court’s answer was unequivocal and clear and several of its principles are directly relevant here such as the Court reaffirming that where a High Court frames procedural rules in exercise of its powers under Section 129 CPC (allowing High Courts to regulate its own procedure in the exercise of its original civil jurisdiction), those rules enjoy an overriding status and are not subordinate to the general provisions of the CPC. The “notwithstanding anything in this Code” clause was held to be substantive, reflecting legislative intent to permit deviation from the CPC where the High Court has consciously designed a specialised procedural regime. Then, the Court emphasised that silence or specificity in such rules is not accidental because where the High Court has chosen to regulate procedure in a particular manner, general CPC powers cannot be invoked to bypass or dilute that choice. Iridium also reinforces the maxim that special law prevails over general law, the CPC being a general procedural statute, while rules framed under Section 129 constitute special law governing the High Court’s exercise of jurisdiction. Finally, the decision cautions against unsettling settled procedural architectures in the name of convenience or uniformity, recognising that procedural differentiation is often a product of deliberate legislative and institutional design.
In the context of the above, the tension then becomes very clear in the present case. The IPD did not emerge organically from the CPC’s transfer provisions. Its creation was a deliberate institutional choice, framed explicitly in exercise of powers under Section 7 of the Delhi High Court Act, 1966, Section 129 CPC, and the amended IP statutes post-TRA 2021. This matters because Section 129 is not a routine rule-making provision. As Iridium makes clear, it is a constitutional safety valve designed to preserve the procedural autonomy of High Courts exercising original jurisdiction. The opening words, “Notwithstanding anything in this Code”, are not just decorative, but serve a substantive purpose. They reflect legislative intent to override the CPC where the High Court has chosen to regulate its own procedure. By framing the IPD Rules under Section 129, the Delhi High Court was not merely filling procedural gaps; it was exercising a special, overriding power. The Rules, therefore, cannot be treated as subordinate or merely facilitative instruments that yield whenever Section 24 CPC is invoked.
What is Rule 26 – A Silence? Or a Proper Boundary?
The controversy in Surinder Kumar turns on Rule 26 of the IPD Rules, which contemplates the consolidation of IP matters pending before Commercial Courts. The Court reads this specificity as non-exclusionary, thinking that since Rule 26 does not expressly bar consolidation of non-commercial suits, Section 24 CPC may be freely deployed. This interpretive move is, however, very difficult to reconcile with Iridium.
In Iridium, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that High Court rules must conform to the CPC merely because the Letters Patent say the Court shall be “guided” by it. The phrase “as far as possible” was held to be directory, not mandatory. Where the High Court frames a rule that departs from the CPC, that departure must be respected as intentional.
Applying that logic here, Rule 26’s express reference to Commercial Courts should be read not as oversight, but as specified and intentional design by the High Court. The IPD Rules were crafted against the backdrop of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, which introduces a distinct procedural regime, stricter timelines, mandatory case management, and limited adjournments. Consolidation under Rule 26 preserves procedural symmetry because then the result is like being heard with like. Allowing non-commercial suits, deliberately kept outside the Commercial Courts framework due to valuation, to be absorbed into IPD proceedings via Section 24 CPC unsettles this balance (as has been recognised in other contexts, here). It should also be noted that seen in the light of the Act being consciously designed to create a separate, accelerated track for “commercial disputes” above a specified valuation threshold, Rule 26 of the IPD Rules appears to mirror, rather than contradict the Commercial Courts framework by permitting consolidation only where matters are already subject to the commercial procedural regime. DHC’s approach, which treats valuation-based segregation as incidental and readily dissolvable via Section 24 CPC, arguably cuts against the Commercial Courts Act’s core logic.
To reiterate it further, the judgment’s central premise is that Section 24 CPC embodies a broad, stage-agnostic power of transfer that remains untouched by Rule 26. But Iridium cautions precisely against such reasoning. General provisions of the CPC cannot be used to control or cut down special procedural regimes preserved by Section 129. Thus, Surinder Kumar, reversing this hierarchy, is not correct.
What about the Question of the High Court’s Jurisdiction to Hear?
A re-emerging implication in the judgment is that since the High Court is competent to hear both commercial and non-commercial IP disputes, consolidating them is harmless. This, however, conflates jurisdiction with procedure. The High Court’s jurisdiction over both categories does not answer how those disputes must be processed. The entire purpose of creating the IPD, post-TRA 2021, was to channel IP disputes through differentiated procedural tracks, not to collapse them into one single stream. Iridium reminds us that procedural differentiation is not an oversight but rather a deliberate thought.
Conclusion
The Surinder Kumar case advances a vision of IP adjudication driven by consolidation and convenience. But, in doing so, it ends up underplaying the significance of the IPD’s statutory foundations and boundaries. By subordinating Rule 26 and, by extension even Section 129 CPC, to Section 24 CPC, the judgment risks unsettling a carefully planned out procedural system. The Supreme Court in Iridium warned against precisely this outcome, that is, allowing general procedural law to swallow special regimes crafted with intent, history, and purpose.
The concerns raised in this judgment also become sharper in light of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Tribunal Reforms Act, 2021, for re-enacting provisions already held unconstitutional in the Madras Bar Association cases. The Court reaffirmed that carefully designed adjudicatory frameworks cannot be diluted in the name of convenience or efficiency. This raises an important question for Surinder Kumar that if special procedural regimes are meant to prevail over general powers, does relying on Section 24 CPC to bypass the limits of the IPD Rules risk undermining the very procedural design the IPD was created to preserve?
