India's embattled cricket chiefs on Wednesday won a long-running battle in the country's highest court, which upheld their independence and dismissed the appeal by a media group denied lucrative television rights. The Supreme Court, in a 3-2 ruling, said the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was an autonomous body which did not come under the purview of the government just because it picked the Indian team.

The court said that if the cash-rich BCCI, which runs the country's most popular sport, was to be held as "an instrumentality of the government", then all other sporting federations should also be declared a "state".

If the court had agreed that the board came under government purview then Zee Telefilms, India's largest listed media company, was likely to have kept broadcasting rights granted after a tender process.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2005