Exclusive: Foes for 17 years, Zee and BCCI to bury Indian cricket’s long standing hatchet

Indian cricket’s long-standing sagas, as old as perhaps the beginning of the rise of India’s financial power in the game globally, is coming to a happy end. The Zee Group (Zee Entertainment Enterprises) – Zee Telefilms until 2013 when it demerged into three separate entities – is pulling out of all pending and dormant legal cases against the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) with immediate effect. Friendships turn sour, enemies turn friends, but life goes on.

These two bitter rivals first landed in the Madras High Court in 2005 when Zee served the Indian cricket board with “a notice for causing the broadcast company losses” in excess of Rs 1600 crore. Since then, the two entities got entangled in two more legal battles – in the Bombay High Court and eventually the Supreme Court of India – between 2005 and 2007 before getting at each other’s throats when Zee launched the now-extinct Indian Cricket League (ICL). In between, there were criminal cases against each other too.

The Zee Group first charged the BCCI, then led by former president Jagmohan Dalmiya, with issuing threats and Dalmiya, later, charged the Zee Group with similar allegations. The battle with Zee and the launch of the ICL, in fact, forced the BCCI to take immediate action and launch the ‘official’ Indian Premier League (IPL) with immediate effect. The rivalry did not just end here.

The two parties continued to fight heightened legal battles and even got the Competitions Commission of India (CCI) to intervene. However, the launch of IPL, the global participation, the public reception and the general popularity and sentiment eventually put paid to Zee's battle plans. “What’s gone under the bridge is now past.