Tiger Tiger Burning Bright-A quick snapshot of where we stand

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the Tiger Global Holdings case, the decision will fundamentally reshape India’s international tax landscape by redefining the balance between treaty certainty and anti-avoidance. A ruling affirming the Delhi High Court would entrench treaty assurances, particularly grandfathering protections, as binding legal guarantees insulated from retrospective substance based scrutiny, confining GAAR strictly to its statutory domain and reinforcing certainty, legitimate expectation, and India’s credibility as a treaty partner. Conversely, acceptance of the Revenue’s substance centric approach would recalibrate decades of settled jurisprudence by subordinating treaty text and negotiated protections to judicial or administrative assessments of commercial substance, even absent formal GAAR invocation, thereby transforming anti avoidance from a legislated framework into a pervasive interpretative principle with far reaching implications for treaty law, investor confidence, and judicial review.