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"Merger is the counterpart of surrender. Under a surrender, the landlord acquires the lease, whereas merger is the consequence of the tenant retaining the lease and acquiring the reversion, or of a third party acquiring both lease and reversion. The principle is the same in both surrender and merger: the lease is absorbed by the reversion and destroyed.

For merger to be effective, the lease and the reversion must be vested in the same person in the same right with no vested estate intervening."

Thus, the ingredients are that two immediate estates should come into the hands of the same person at the same time and it must be rights in the whole of the property. A merger is prevented if there is an intermediate estate outstanding with another at the relevant time.

6. Obviously, the taking of an assignment of a fraction of the reversion, or the rights of a co-owner landlord, does not and cannot bring about a determination of the lease in terms of Section 111(d) of the Transfer of Property Act. That a lease is not extinguished because the lessee purchases a part of the reversion was laid down by the Privy Council in Faquir Baksh vs. Murli Dhar (58 Indian Appeals 75). Their Lordships after setting out the terms of Section 111 of the Transfer of Property Act quoted with approval the statement of the law made by the trial Court in that case that for a merger to take place, "The fusion of interests required by law is to be in respect of the whole of the property." This Court in Badri Narain Jha and others vs. Rameshwar Dayal Singh and others (1951 SCR 153) held that if a lessor purchases the whole of the lessee's interest, the lease is extinguished by merger, but there can be no merger or extinction where one of several joint holders of the mokarrari interest purchases portion of the lakhraj interest. It was held that when there was no coalescence of the interest of the lessor and the lessee in the whole of the estate, there could be no determination of the lease by merger. We do not think that it is necessary to multiply authorities in the face of the plain language of the provision and the authoritative pronouncements of the Privy Council and of this Court referred to above. The position emerging from the relevant provision of the Transfer of Property Act is that the lease or tenancy does not get determined, by the tenant acquiring the rights of a co-owner landlord and a merger takes place and the lease gets determined only if the entire reversion or the entire rights of the landlord are purchased by the tenant.