Sharad Pawar: 'If they [players] choose to play for the ICL, it is only fair that they should not expect benefits and privileges from BCCI' © Getty Images Enlarge

BCCI president Sharad Pawar has defended the Indian board's stand on withdrawing financial benefits from players involved with the Indian Cricket League (ICL), saying the tournament was an "out and out commercial venture".

The players, he said, were free to play for the ICL but it was only "fair" that they should not expect benefits and privileges from the board. Pawar was replying to a letter from the general secretary of the Congress party, Digvijay Singh, asking the board to give up its confrontationist attitude towards the ICL. Singh's letter had said the BCCI was a non-profit organisation and what it had done to popularise cricket was "eminently obvious".

"You are right in saying the players should be free to 'opt and play as per their own wish'," Pawar wrote. "It is most certainly up to the players to choose whether they wish to play under the banner of the BCCI or ICL. If they choose to play for the ICL, it is only fair that they should not expect benefits and privileges from the BCCI."

Pawar said the board's earnings were spent on financing cricketing activities of various state associations and in augmenting infrastructural facilities. The ICL, he said, was "an out and out commercial venture", which had no track record yet to prove otherwise.

The ICL, however, received a boost from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which said that the unofficial league would "help in breaking the BCCI's monopoly".

"With the ICL, the bureaucratic attitude as well as the monopoly of the BCCI will break," BJP vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told PTI. "They [BCCI] always pose like a government body whose decisions are constitutionally binding. Nowhere in the world does any association monopolise a game."

Naqvi is the latest politician to support the ICL after Digvijay Singh and federal railway minister Lalu Prasad, who offered to make the ministry's stadiums available for the proposed Twenty20 tournament.