ABSTRACT

The prohibition of undesirable execution of notifiable combinations also known as ‘gun jumping’ is one of the important elements of the mandatory and suspensory merger control regime which has been established by the Competition Act of 2002. The article outlines the historical evolvement of the prohibition from the beginning of the Competition Commission of India and the triggering document case law to the wave of enforcement of information-exchange interpretation from 2024 to 2026 and places it in the context of the structural reforms made by Competition (Amendment) Act of 2023 particularly, deal value threshold and shortened 150-day review.

The position of India is observed in comparison with the experience of European Union, USA and Israel before the article highlights the doctrinal problems of the thresholds of the combination coming into force, increasing reliance on commercially sensitive information as some kind of possibility for measurement of any material influence and the noticeable impact made by the Supreme Court’s intervention in Amazon-Future Coupons litigation which is an important reason of uncertainty for the parties involved. It also analyses the latest legal and regulatory changes, including the pending Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026. The author concludes by addressing the challenges presented by the need for a stringent enforcement framework, which must meet the conditions of a mature framework of merger control.

Keywords: Competition Law, Gun Jumping, Deal Value Threshold, Standstill Obligations and Comparative Perspective.

I. Introduction

‘Jumping the gun’, an idiom borrowed from the starting blocks of track and field, describing a competitor who begins running before the starting signal, has, over the past decade, become one of the most consequential and closely litigated phrases in Indian merger control practice.[1] In competition law parlance, it describes conduct by which parties to a notifiable combination either fail to notify the Competition Commission of India (‘the CCI’ or ‘the Commission’) of a transaction that meets the jurisdictional thresholds prescribed under sections 5 and 6 of the Competition Act 2002 (‘the Act’), or proceed to implement the transaction, in whole or in part, before the Commission has approved it or the statutorily prescribed review period has lapsed.[2]

The Indian merger control regime is, in this respect, mandatory and suspensory: unlike the voluntary notification systems that prevail in a handful of jurisdictions, parties to a notifiable transaction in India have no discretion either to notify or to abstain from notifying, and unlike hybrid regimes that permit conditional closing, they may not close the transaction until the CCI grants approval or the prescribed period expires, whichever occurs first.[3] This ‘standstill obligation’, codified in section 6(2A) of the Act, exists to preserve the pre-merger competitive relationship between the parties for the duration of the Commission’s assessment. The underlying rationale, as the Commission itself has explained, is that any erosion of independent competitive conduct during the interim period cannot be fully undone even where the Commission subsequently blocks or modifies the transaction on account of an appreciable adverse effect on competition.[4] The obligation is, in other words, prophylactic rather than merely remedial: it is designed to prevent an anti-competitive state of affairs from arising at all, rather than to unwind one after the fact, since certain forms of competitive harm, the loss of an independent commercial rival, the premature transfer of strategic information, the dulling of a target’s incentive to compete, are not readily capable of ex post reversal even by an order of divestiture.

For much of the past decade, the Commission’s gun-jumping jurisprudence developed against a comparatively static statutory backdrop: asset and turnover thresholds that remained substantially unrevised between 2011 and 2024, a two-hundred-and-ten-day outer deemed-approval period, and a thirty-day notification deadline that was itself suspended in 2017 and periodically renewed thereafter.[5] That equilibrium has, in the last three years, been disturbed. The Competition (Amendment) Act 2023, operationalised in phases through notifications and subordinate regulations issued between May 2023 and September 2024, has introduced a deal value threshold, compressed review timelines, and revised the statutory basis on which gun-jumping penalties are computed.[6] Concurrently, the Commission’s decisional practice has entered what commentators have described as an enforcement ‘spree’, with 2025 recording more gun-jumping determinations than several of the preceding years combined, and with the analytical centre of gravity shifting away from the formal question of notification timing towards the substantive question of access to commercially sensitive information.[7] The Supreme Court’s intervention in May 2026, setting aside the Commission’s best-known and largest gun-jumping-adjacent penalty, the ₹202 crore order against Amazon in the Future Coupons matter, has further recalibrated the jurisdictional and evidentiary discipline within which the Commission must operate, and that recalibration has, in turn, already begun to shape the Commission’s approach to the fresh wave of enforcement orders passed in the first half of 2026.[8]

This article undertakes a doctrinal re-examination of the law of gun-jumping under the Act in light of these developments. Part II maps the statutory architecture of the standstill obligation. Part III examines the structural reforms introduced by the 2023 Amendment and its subordinate rules, with particular attention to the deal value threshold. Part IV traces the Commission’s decisional practice, from the foundational trigger-document cases through the information-exchange jurisprudence of 2021–22 to the green-channel and limitation controversies of 2024–26. Part V provides contemporary regulatory and enforcement developments of 2025–26. Part VI provides that comparative analyses of Indian position with that of European Union, together with reference to the United States and Israel. Part VII identifies the doctrinal and structural fault that continue to generate uncertainty notwithstanding a decade and a half of enforcement, and Part VIII proposes  reforms directed at converting the Commission’s presently fact-intensive, case-by-case approach into a more codified and predictable framework.

[1]Sachin Goyal and Konark Bhandari, ‘Gun Jumping in India: Lessons from the Competition Commission of India’s Enforcement Activities’ (2017) 5(2) Journal of Antitrust Enforcement 216, 217.

[2]Competition Act 2002, s 6(2A).

[3]Ravikant Bhardwaj, Business Implications of Gun Jumping in Combination Regulations (Working Paper, School of Competition Law and Market Regulation, Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, June 2015).

[4]Bharti Airtel Limited, Combination Registration No C-2017/10/531, order of the Competition Commission of India dated 27 August 2018.

[5]Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Notification No S.O. 2039(E), 29 June 2017, suspending the thirty-day notification requirement under s 6(2) of the Competition Act 2002; the suspension was subsequently renewed by further notification dated 16 March 2022, extending its validity to 28 June 2027.

[6]Competition (Amendment) Act 2023; Ministry of Corporate Affairs Notification dated 18 May 2023 bringing the first tranche of provisions into force; Ministry of Corporate Affairs Notification dated 9 September 2024 (effective 10 September 2024) bringing the deal value threshold and the Competition Commission of India (Combinations) Regulations 2024 into force.

[7]‘Trends in Gun-Jumping: Recurring Themes in CCI’s Decisional Practice in CY 2025’ (PYMNTS/CPI, 11 March 2026).

[8]Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC v Competition Commission of India and Ors, Civil Appeal No 4974 of 2022, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 27 May 2026 (Nath and Mehta JJ).