By Ronojoy Sen<\/p>\n
The recently-held Asia Cup, which brought together the top Asian cricketing nations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), will be remembered less for the cricket and more for the off-field politics. <\/p>\n
India\u2019s captain, Suryakumar Yadav, refused to shake hands with his Pakistani counterpart, Salman Agha, in all three matches, including the final, between the two countries. Similarly, the two teams did not engage in handshakes after all their matches, as is the norm in cricket matches. To worsen matters, the Indian team refused to collect the trophy after winning the final since it was being presented by Mohsin Naqvi, the Asian Cricket Council Chairman and Pakistan\u2019s Interior Minister.<\/p>\n
The animosity was not confined to the refusal to shake hands. In the post-match press conference, after the first match between India and Pakistan, Yadav dedicated the victory to\u00a0India\u2019s \u201carmed forces\u201d<\/a>. In the second match, Pakistani batsman Sahibzada Farhan mimicked the firing of an AK-47 rifle upon reaching a milestone and Pakistani bowler Haris Rauf made gestures depicting the downing of aircraft, in apparent references to the recent India-Pakistan conflict. Before the final, Naqvi, who is also the head of the Pakistan Cricket Board,\u00a0reposted images on X<\/a>\u00a0(formerly Twitter) of Pakistani cricketers wearing flight suits with images of airborne fighter jets in the background.<\/p>\n The Indian team\u2019s on-field action reflected the Board of Control for Cricket in India\u2019s and, by extension, the Indian government\u2019s stand on Pakistan following the recent border conflict and the Pulwama terror attack. The cricketers merely did what they were told to do. The same applied to the Pakistani players who were told to engage in brinkmanship during their match against the UAE to ostensibly protest against the match referee\u2019s actions in the India-Pakistan match. The\u00a0lack of agency of Indian cricketers<\/a>\u00a0can be attributed to the subservience of sportspersons to the state and the various sports federations that are also, more often than not, controlled by politicians.<\/p>\n In the larger scheme of things, however, the Asia Cup spells the demise of what has been termed \u2018cricket diplomacy\u2019. The connection of sport and nationalism has been noted by many, including writer George Orwell and historian E J Hobsbawm. India-Pakistan sporting contests, especially on the cricket pitch, are a good example, irrespective of the public rhetoric, of the fusion of sport and nationalism. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai had once described India-Pakistan contests as\u00a0\u201cthinly disguised national wars\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, cricket has also been a tool to foster better relations between India and Pakistan, leading to the coinage of the term \u2018cricket diplomacy\u2019. India and Pakistan played against each other for the first time on the cricket field in 1952. The series, played in good spirit, was an example of sport bringing together two nations only five years after their birth in the midst of unprecedented violence, suffering and war. Since then, there have been many instances of cricket cutting through animosity, albeit fleetingly.<\/p>\n The two nations continued playing Test matches until the 1965 the India-Pakistan war snapped cricket ties between the countries for over a decade. When sporting relations resumed in 1978, a few years after the 1971 India-Pakistan war and the birth of Bangladesh, the term \u2018cricket diplomacy\u2019 first came into currency. After India\u2019s tour of Pakistan in 1978, then Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq said at a farewell dinner for the Indian cricketers that the goodwill and friendship generated by the cricket matches should bring the two countries closer, even in politics. Indian\u2019s then Foreign Minister and future Prime Minister,\u00a0Atal Bihari Vajpayee<\/a>, noted that the Indian cricket team had made a \u201csignificant contribution towards promoting goodwill and understanding between the people of India and Pakistan\u201d.<\/p>\n Perhaps the best example of this was the so-called\u00a0\u2018friendship series\u2019<\/a>\u00a0in 2004, when the Indian cricket team toured Pakistan for the first time in 14 years, not too long after the Kargil war and the terror attack on the Indian parliament. Then Prime Minister Vajpayee put the series into perspective when he famously said,\u00a0\u201dKhel hi nahin, dil bhi jitiye<\/a>\u00a0(Win not only matches, but hearts too)\u201d. Some 20,000 Indians crossed over to Pakistan to watch the matches, resulting in an unprecedented people-to-people exchange. The following year, then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf accepted an invitation from India to watch a match in New Delhi alongside then India\u2019s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.<\/p>\n After the Mumbai terror attack in 2008, cricketing ties nosedived. Pakistani players were shunned in the Indian Premier League after 2008 and continue to be banned. However, while bilateral tours were put off, cricket diplomacy did not die. When India and Pakistan played each other at Mohali in the semi-final of the 2011 cricket World Cup, then Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was invited for the match and he watched it in the company of Singh, his Indian counterpart.<\/p>\n Though Congress Member of Parliament and former Minister of State of External Affairs, Shashi Tharoor, noted that\u00a0\u201ccricket will follow diplomacy, not precede it\u201d<\/a>, the game has occasionally played a role in thawing relations when other doors have been shut. Indeed, Tharoor argued that by\u00a0refusing to shake hands<\/a>, India demonised an \u201centire populace\u201d and played \u201cdirectly into the hands\u201d of forces that it sought to combat.<\/p>\n The Asia Cup marks the nadir, if not the death, of cricket diplomacy. The equating of the cricket field with a battleground too was made starkly clear by\u00a0Prime Minister Narendra Modi<\/a>\u00a0when on X he described India\u2019s victory as an \u2018Operation Sindoor\u2019 \u2013 the codename for India\u2019s missile strikes in May 2025 on terrorist sites in Pakistan \u2013 on the \u201cgames field\u201d.<\/p>\n About the author: Dr Ronojoy Sen is a Senior Research Fellow and Research Lead (Politics, Society and Governance) at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He can be contacted at\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>. The author bears full responsibility for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper.<\/p>\n