Influencer marketing has created a parallel advertising economy out of regular customers with cameras and opinions. These days, YouTubers, Instagrammers, and bloggers review everything from protein powder to cellphones to coconut oil, and their opinions frequently have a greater impact on viewers than advertisements from businesses. As expected, friction has resulted from this. Businesses now worry about a single creator with a few lakh members and a critical video instead of just competing advertisements. A rising corpus of Indian case law on "product disparagement," trademark misuse, and defamation as it relates to influencer content has been the legal response. There are also growing concerns about the implications of these decisions for online free speech.

Where It Started: The Parachute Coconut Oil Case

The case widely seen as the starting point of this trend is Marico Limited v. Abhijeet Bhansali (Bombay High Court, 2019–2020). YouTuber Abhijeet Bhansali, who ran the channel "Bearded Chokra," posted a video titled "Is Parachute Coconut Oil 100% Pure?" questioning the purity of Marico's Parachute coconut oil and pointing viewers toward alternative products, including competitors. Marico sued for disparagement, slander of goods and trademark misuse, and sought an injunction to have the video taken down.

A single Bombay High Court judge (Justice S.J. Kathawalla) granted Marico an interim injunction in January 2020, ruling that although commercial speech is protected by Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, it does not cover insulting or maligning another's product. The ruling went further, noting that social media influencers, regardless of the size of their fan base, have actual control over their viewers and, as such, have a greater obligation to make sure their information is truthful, careless, or deceptive.

In February 2020, a Division Bench consisting of Chief Justice Pradeep Nandrajog and Justice Bharati Dangre significantly weakened the ruling following an appeal. It concluded that assertions of opinion, as opposed to incorrect statements of fact, could not be easily prohibited, that Marico itself had made similar claims regarding its product, and that a number of the "falsehoods" pointed out by the single judge were not clearly proven. Instead of being completely removed, the video was permitted to remain online with only minor changes.

Even in its diluted form, the case became a benchmark because it established the legal standard for disparagement (falsity, malice/recklessness, and special damage) as it applied to online video content, acknowledged influencers as a separate category of commercial speech, and indicated that Indian courts were prepared to provide immediate, sometimes ex parte, relief against creators.

The Subsequent Cases

1. The debate around food blogging and the "certification" response (2019). Shortly after the Marico ruling, some segments of India's hospitality sector suggested that only "certified" food bloggers be permitted to post evaluations of restaurants, threatening to sue uncertified reviewers for defamation if they uploaded unfavorable comments. Although this was not a court case in and of itself, it demonstrated how easily a single judicial precedent could be used—or abused—as a threat against regular reviewers, prompting complaints from digital rights organizations that certification-linked liability would stifle truthful consumer expression.

2. A significant change in direction was made in San Nutrition Pvt. Ltd. v. Arpit Mangal & Ors. (Delhi High Court, 2025).

Relying largely on the Marico precedent, San Nutrition, which distributes whey protein under the "Doctor's Choice" brand, sued a number of influencers over videos that questioned the quality of its goods. This time, independent lab reports from NABL-accredited testing organizations supported the influencers' assertions. Unlike in Marico, the court denied the injunction after appointing amici curiae with free-speech stakes and reviewing the recordings and supporting data. According to Justice Amit Bansal, the plaintiff had failed to demonstrate that the defenses of truth and fair comment were unworkable, and disparagement could not be proven when criticism was supported by reliable, verifiable facts rather than being stated carelessly or intentionally.

According to commentary on the decision, it is one of the most explicit court rulings confirming that evidence-based criticism by influencers is protected expression rather than disparagement.

3. The Delhi High Court's decision in NxtQuantum Shift Technologies (AI+ Smartphones) v. John Doe & Ors. (2026) reversed the trend. In response to reviews that questioned the phones' design, technical promises, and branding, the firm behind "AI+" smartphones and its founder sued anonymous YouTubers, including channels that published videos with titles that were obviously inflammatory. Even though several of the same videos also praised certain qualities of the device, the court ordered an ex parte ad interim injunction, noting that the reviews lacked technical data or reliable testing to support their claims and had the potential to inflict financial harm. Using the Marico line of reasoning once more, the decision prohibited the specified channels and unnamed "John Doe" defendants from releasing any more derogatory content.

4. Prior, non-influencer FMCG advertising disputes like Hindustan Unilever Ltd. v. Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (the "Amul vs. Kwality Walls" case) and Dabur India Ltd. v. Colortek Meghalaya Pvt. Ltd., which both outline when comparative advertising crosses into unlawful disparagement, are the basis for the broader "disparagement" doctrine that underpins all of these cases. Following Marico, courts started applying this commercial-advertising doctrine which was primarily created for company-versus-company advertising wars to individual producers who were assessing things in their personal or quasi-journalistic capacity. This resulted in a totally different power dynamic.

The Dangers: The Significance of These Orders for Free Expression When considered collectively, this corpus of case law presents a number of legitimate issues:

1. Speech is silenced prior to a full hearing through ex parte and interim relief. Based only on the plaintiff's account of events, many of these injunctions are issued at an early, biased stage, frequently within days of a suit being filed. Long before the influencer has had a genuine chance to be heard, let alone before the veracity of the underlying claims is put to the test in court, the video is removed (or the channel is constrained). Ex parte injunctions in defamation-related cases should continue to be the exception rather than the rule, according to courts themselves, but practice has not always followed that principle.
2. Orders that are too general or vague may restrict more speech than is intended. Orders that are sufficiently wide to include "any disparaging content" in the future rather than the particular statements deemed unacceptable run the risk of acting as a general gag rather than a specifically targeted remedy, so resolving the entire dispute at the interim stage without a trial.
3. Even in the absence of a final decision against the inventor, asymmetric litigation power has a chilling impact. Regardless of the eventual merits, an individual influencer facing a company's legal team, cease-and-desist notifications, and a commercial court file has enormous incentives to just remove a video or self-censor future criticism. As seen in the food-blogger certification incident, the sheer prospect of legal action has the power to stifle far more acceptable expression than any one ruling.
4. Individuals are being subject to the commercial speech doctrine, which was created for advertising. A rough equivalency between two commercial advertisements fighting it out was expected by the original disparagement framework. If the same approach is applied to a single reviewer who has a camera and a fan base but has institutional legal or laboratory resources, it runs the possibility of subjecting regular creators to a standard that only well-funded commercial actors can truly fulfill.

Conclusion

The path from Marico v. Bhansali to the San Nutrition and AI+ Smartphones cases demonstrates that Indian courts are still determining on a case-by-case basis, without established legislative safeguards, where sincere, if pointed, product criticism ends and actionable disparagement starts. Because of this uncertainty and the growing prevalence of ex parte, there is a genuine concern that larger corporations may utilize litigation, even unsuccessful litigation, as a means of silencing smaller, less well-funded critics. The theory is not without subtlety, and as San Nutrition shows, judges are able to defend well-supported criticism.