India-Pakistan Jingoist Power Play at Asia Cup Cricket
Leslie Xavier
THE game of cricket has changed in the past fortnight or so, and for the worse. The cascading effects of what happened during the Asia Cup in Dubai are here: at the subsequent ICC Women’s World Cup in Sri Lanka, Indian cricket team players refrained from shaking hands or greeting the Pakistan players during their game on October 5. The women just mirrored their male counterparts' act of diluting the sanctity of cricket with jingoist fervour.
Clearly, what happened in Dubai is not staying in Dubai. It will echo down the years, marring the game and robbing it of the spirit which any sporting endeavour strives to uphold. Art, literature, and sport — human pursuits with larger existential meanings attached — provide lenses to introspect and avenues to set the course of history right. However, it is alarming when these are usurped and appropriated by the ills.
We are in 2025. The world is seeing conflicts of varying degrees across different geographies, including an unabashed genocide in Gaza. Closer to home, we had the post-Pahalgam Operation Sindoor and a four-day India-Pakistan conflict in May. At the time, war was seen as a game, and every bomb was celebrated as if it were a goal scored or a wicket captured in India, and across the border in Pakistan, in equal measure. But when fireworks burst during Operation Sindoor, celebrating “victory”, those among us who were caught up in the ethical and humane dilemma, thinking of the lives lost or destroyed, wondered: Is war a sport?
Or. is sport war? It is dangerous when that conflict permeates the non-political aspects of life, including sport. While instances of blatant use of sport for geopolitical power plays have their precedents, none have had the sportspersons as the main characters. That’s a new low. That script played out at the 2025 Asia Cup, bringing cricket, its history and heritage, its players, its fandom, and its socio-political and cultural underpinnings all into disrepute. All of it in three lopsided India-Pak games where an innings, or a beautiful spell of seam bowling, or a cat-and-mouse game of the bat and the ball, never ended up being discussed.
After the Indian cricket board-led financial takeover, continental tournaments have become one-sided affairs anyway. India asserts its big brother status, making the tournament, symbolically, gully cricket at best, bullying at worst. So, the drama in Dubai that ended up being widely discussed in the media and on the larger social media was created not by the bat or the ball. It was by the symbolic and overt jingoism, which started with hue and cry over India playing Pakistan while a conflict loomed.
Well, if it were about taking a stance as a nation, then, instead of allowing a situation with public outcry and drama, the state could have taken a policy decision not to play against Pakistan. They did not stop playing because an Indo-Pak match is good business. However, once they have decided to play, they should have adhered to the spirit of the game, nothing more, nothing less.
But jingoism was the umbrella strategy employed liberally during the tournament. The Indian players, surely at the behest of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), refused to shake hands with the Pakistan team members after the game. This continued through the tournament, becoming a sore point, as well as, sadly, a point of celebration for fans too.
India beat Pakistan, yes. Well played, boys, but you missed the whole point of winning hearts. The Indians went down a path of no return by refusing to greet the opposition players. So, what did the Indians lose there? To start with, they lost the plot, a larger sportsmanship score, and the most damning of all, they ensured the game lost its sanctity.
Equally disturbing were the statements from the Indian skipper Suryakumar Yadav, whose performance was aptly matched, or even surpassed, by the Pakistan players. Haris Rauf’s ‘crashing jet’ celebration exemplified it. Jasprit Bumrah returned the favour to make it even on the scoreboard.
It is interesting that the two primary parties here, Yadav and Rauf, had horrible tournaments. The Indian captain had an unbeaten 47 (not out) in India's second game of the tournament. Yes, against Pakistan. However, in the other games, he had scores of 7 (not out), 0 (against Pak), 5, 12, and 1 (in the final). Rauf, meanwhile, single-handedly ensured Pakistan lost by conceding 50 runs in his four overs in the final.
Were the two using the rather easy, jingoistic path to stay relevant in the discussions around the tournament? Possibly. The players have adopted the prevalent political playbook quite beautifully. Whatever the issue may be, stir up emotions and banter around irrelevant matters, and the attention diverts. If it is centred around war, all the better. A classic cover-drive, indeed!
And then came the ignominious moment. The champion team’s players chose to be petty in victory. The Indian players refused to lift the trophy or accept their medals, for it meant receiving them from the hands of Mohsin Naqvi, Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister, chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), and the president of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC).
In Dubai, the Indian players took it upon themselves to save the Pakistani minister from what would have been a heavyhearted job of awarding and congratulating them for the victory. Had that happened, it may not have bridged divides, but it would have doused some of the ire the tournament stoked on both sides of the border.
Politicians playing with this narrative, using it rather, and newsrooms riling things up are all par for the course these days in India. So Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tweet likening the victory to Operation Sindoor’s result was hardly surprising. That ensured that in case the fans and players got lost in the celebration of the game, they got a reminder: It is the war that needs celebration, not a century, not a wicket, and certainly not an uncollected trophy.
Sport, alongside art and literature, one hoped, would remain as bastions upholding humanity’s last straw of hope. However, it is the politics of sports that takes precedence. Across sports, especially those under the Olympic umbrella, political influence, any form of acts of prejudice (symbolic or not), is not tolerated. The teams or players involved will get heavily penalized. Not in cricket, at least, not anymore.
There was a time in history when ceasefires were called for to allow sport to take centre stage. There is this legendary instance during a Santos FC tour in Nigeria in 1969. With the Biafran War raging at the time, a 48-hour ceasefire was reportedly announced to allow people to watch Pelé play. It was an exhibition match between the Brazilian club and the Nigerian national team, and the instance is forever etched in history as a display of the power of sports to bridge divides. Cricket’s slide, as seen in Dubai during the Asia Cup, will be remembered in history as a representative of the exact opposite of that. This could prove to be a turning point in how those in power wield sport’s potential.
As far as the India-Pakistan narrative is concerned, it took a few decades in the making to reach the unsalvageable depths of disrepute it has reached now. In the early years of cricket’s cable TV-driven explosion in the 1990s, India-Pakistan bilateral series, and even matchups in multi-nation tournaments, were billed as war. In those days, as fans, we assumed this was probably an analogy to highlight how competitive the games are.
The Indian batting stars facing a Pakistani pace battery, matching every swing and bounce with artistic willow swooshes, come to mind here. They were hard-fought games that ended with pats on the back and customary handshakes. In 2004, that’s exactly what then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee stressed when he asked the players to win hearts too, and not just matches, during the tour of Pakistan after the Kargil War.
However, by billing the games as war, the seeds of animosity on the pitch were sown in a seemingly innocuous manner back then. Fast forward a few decades, and we saw it grow into one of the biggest moments of disgrace cricket has ever endured, with its roots deeply entrenched in the psyche of the two nations.
As far as India is concerned, maybe it is difficult to escape being sucked into the larger atmosphere prevalent in the country. Journalism, as we know, has succumbed to it. They, as always, stoked the fire of war in the Asia Cup too. They fell rather tamely (using cricketing parlance here). Art and literature, well, they are on sticky wickets at the moment. And sports, cricket to be precise, dismissed itself out of social and cultural relevance thanks to this current crop of Indian ambassadors of the game, and their rather confined understanding of what they are playing for, and for whom.
The Indian team has moved on pretty quickly, though. The next tour is announced. The team is prepping. The women’s teams of both countries clashed at the World Cup in Sri Lanka, continuing the war games.
Will the game ever recover from the fall from grace in Dubai? Can cricket shake off the bitter narrative of the victory and defeat that it was dragged into by the politicians, the cricket administrators, and the players? It may take some time before we realise the real damage done by what transpired at the Asia Cup. Till then, let us stick to our standard line: Score kya hai?
