”India forces Pak to surrender”. That was The Telegraph’s front-page headline after India’s 39-run win over Pakistan in the 1996 World Cup quarter-final.

Years later, the newspaper’s then-deputy editor admitted the headline could have easily suited a report on an actual war between the two countries

Now, just four months after the neighbours stood on the brink of war in early May, the battlefield imagery has taken over their cricketing rivalry in the ongoing Asia Cup.

As if the outside noise wasn’t martial enough, the players’ on-field verbal duels are keeping the warlike drums beating loudly on social media. Meanwhile, people are quick to employ Orwell’s clichéd prism of seeing modern sports as “war minus shooting”. But, more than avoiding “shooting” and dead bodies, the simulated belligerence also assures that key performers walk away with millions of dollars.

One doesn’t know whether young Indian batters like Shubham Gill or Abhishek Sharma, or Pakistani pacers like Haris Rauf or Shaheen Afridi, have memories of non-verbal spats too. The funnier ones obviously include Javed Miandad’s angry jumping act to annoy the Indian wicketkeeper in the 1992 World Cup match in Sydney. However, the clearest sign of political posturing seeping into cricketing ties has been the increased calls for suspension of action, rather than during the action itself. 

Demands for playing matches against each other are part of that, and of late, the call for a boycott of such engagements if the cricket boards agreed to play. Earlier, even calls for suspension of cricketing ties were sometimes injected with a sense of urgency. A clear example of such vandalism was when Shiv Sena activists dug up the Kotla pitch in Delhi in 1999 to protest the BCCI’s decision to proceed with the Test series against Pakistan.

The capacity for dramatic calls for boycott hasn’t disappeared in the real world. But the arena seems to have shifted to outrage chambers of social media. That was more evident over the last few weeks till the tournament didn't kick off. Once it did, the on-field heated exchanges, and not plain sledging, have been milked for drawing battlefield parallels. The multilateral nature of the tournament gave BCCI a shield to fend against the fury of protesters. But that’s little comfort. The next thing you saw was the board trying to offset the ire of protesters by other means. 

That meant non-verbal statements as Indian players refused to do the customary handshake with the Pakistan team. Across the border, PCB has its points to score. The board looked the other way when its lead paceman made a jet-downing sign, seen as alluding to Islamabad's claims of downing Indian fighter jets in May. The shadows of a not-so-distant military escalation have clearly loomed large over how teams are locking horns in Dubai. Over the decades, the tense turf of on-field encounters between the two teams, and equally well-publicised off-the-field casual warmth, has been seen to go much beyond the boundary.

Sports and diplomacy

The political subtexts in sporting engagements are known, and so are the larger messaging of disengagements. In the Cold War era, the USA and USSR took turns to stay away from the Olympics hosted by each other. The USA skipped the Moscow Olympics in 1980, while the USSR didn’t turn up at the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. These are only the more noted ones of many more examples of countries making political points on the sporting stage, or even by refusing to take the stage. At the same time, sporting rivalries have been sometimes used for their soft power appeal to try track two diplomacy. 

One doesn’t have to go too far for an example. In 2011, the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers made it a point to watch the 2011 World Cup cricket match between their countries together. That was only three years after the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks and 12 years after the Kargil war. That, expectedly, ran out of steam quickly.

Except for the platitudes of the quixotic “aman ki aasha” candle lovers, many critics see little merit in such use of soft power escapism amidst cross-border tensions. In seeing India as a victim of proxy war, they argue that Islamabad-sponsored terrorists may be fans of Virat Kohli and may hum Bollywood film numbers, but will still bomb Indian cities. So, they see such ideas as woolly-eyed and lacking a clear-sighted view of India’s national security interests and immediate geopolitical needs. 

There is always a temptation to frame the high-pressure India-Pakistan cricket clashes with a communal backdrop, and also the lingering birth pangs of two post-partition countries. Those are easy frames to have, and deserve consideration too. But, they are limiting ones, and don’t tell much.

Nationalistic assertions via matches 

The social history of cricket in pre-Independence India, including Ramchandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field, talks about how some communities, including religious ones, overtly came together to form teams. But that wasn’t mostly seen as important or even exclusivist. It’s more in the post-Independence national  experience of the new neighbours that the sporting rivalry slowly got equated with hostilities of a battlefield. Both potent cricketing nations, sitting next to each other as neighbours, have also had three wars and decades of low-intensity warfare. The hostile equations of national defence have fed the cricketing clashes a readymade script of imagery beyond the field. The public sphere – media, commentators and popular culture – has added grist to the mill. 

It isn’t as if the Indian Muslims don’t continue to be subjected to the Tebbit test of cricket loyalty. They are, and those accused of failing it have also been victims of violence. If religion were the overriding factor, Bangladeshi and Afghan cricket teams would have been in the same light. But, they aren’t. In fact, Afghan spinner Rashid Khan is one of the most loved cricketers in India. But, for that matter, admiration for Pakistani cricketing greats of the past and some from the current crop runs far deeper. 

In the 2023 World Cup, even if some hostile slogans were raised against Pakistani cricketers in an Indian stadium, Babar Azam would be surrounded by cricket fans if he were seen on a street in Delhi. The same could be said about Indian star players on Lahore street, despite the one-off incident of the 1989 Karachi test when a spectator ripped Indian skipper K Srikanth’s shirt after invading the pitch. 

So, what's missing? If religious divide was the key, why do teams from other  Islamic countries escape reactions that only Pakistan evokes among Indian cricket followers? Is it because they aren’t strong or threatening playing units? That's only a small part of the explanation. The bigger picture is tied to history and how national identities were shaped by experiences when military challenges coincided with religious majorities on either side of the border. 

That essentially meant the circumstances of the birth of the two neighbours on religious lines, and the subsequent history of military wars, and Pak-sponsored terrorism of the last three decades or so. So the sporting clashes between the neighbours have become a civilian outlet of nationalistic assertion, imagined through the anxieties and euphoria of military loss and triumph. 

There is another way in which some broadcast commentators used to sum up India’s cricket victories in the 1970s. Those victories were over English and Caribbean teams on foreign soil, not against Pakistan. In what would now sound cringeworthy, a particular Hindi commentator on All India Radio used to preface his live remarks on India’s win as “Ye Buddh aur Gandhi ka desh hai” ( This is the land of Buddha and Gandhi). Quite a civilisational statement for a victory on the cricket field, as if the national memory wanted to say everything in one breath. And quite different from what The Telegraph’s headline writer had thought about India’s victory in a different arena and a different adversary.

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