Despite this, Justice C Hari Shankar's Single Judge Bench ordered "BharatPe" to keep records of the sums received as a result of the use of the mark and to file half-yearly audited statements.

PhonePe (plaintiff) claimed in its High Court suit that "Pe" was an "invented term" that was an integral, dominant, and distinguishing feature of its registered trademarks in the name "PhonePe." Resilient Innovations (defendant), which provided "identical services," was accused of infringing on its registered trademark and selling off. The plaintiff claimed that when a client of average intelligence and memory saw the defendants' label "BharatPe," they would note the "Pe" suffix and equate the defendant's services with the plaintiff's. When viewed as a whole, the defendant argued that the two marks, PhonePe and BharatPe, were visually, phonetically, and structurally distinct. Defendants argued that the BhartPe mark had been in use since 2016 and that the goal of the mark was to create a single QR code for merchants to make payments across all UPI-based user applications, hence the tagline "Bharat Pe Sab Chalta Hai."

It was also argued that the suffix "Pe" was simply a misspelling of the word "Pay," and that no exclusive privileges could be enforced in respect of such a word unless it had gained a secondary meaning in relation to the plaintiff's company. The Court culled out the legal situation after analyzing the rules of the Trademarks Act and a plethora of rulings on the question of trademark infringement:

1.Exclusivity can only be asserted and infringement/passing off suspected in relation to the whole label, not a portion of it. 2.If a symbol has acquired secondary significance necessitates the testimony of members of the public 3. When the defendant establishes that its mark has been widely used, it precludes the plaintiff's mark from gaining secondary significance. 4.However, it is possible to claim infringement of a part if the copied part is the dominant part of an integral feature; 5.Unless a descriptive mark or a descriptive part of a mark has acquired a secondary meaning, no exclusivity can be asserted over it, even if it is misspelled.

The Court held that "PhonePe" and "BharatPe" were both composite marks and that the plaintiff could not assert exclusivity exclusively based on the "Pe" suffix because no infringement could be asserted based on a portion of a registered trademark. As a result, the Court rejected the defendant's appeal for an interim injunction, concluding that no such argument had been made out.