The emotion appropriate to the decision not to shake hands with Pakistani players at the Asia Cup is ruefulness, not outrage. Historically, all team sports from the late nineteenth century onwards have been joined at the hip with the nation-state. From Test cricket to the Olympics, the nation was the glue that gave modern sport meaning.
It shouldn’t surprise us when nationalist rivalry or enmity affects sporting contests. This isn’t an aberration; it is the nature of the beast. Cricket has a history of nation-state interference. During the Bodyline series, when the Australians protested that England’s ‘leg theory’ was against the spirit of cricket, the Marylebone Cricket Club and the British government rejected the charge outright and threatened the Australians with diplomatic retribution. The Australian prime minister at the time intervened to remind Australians of the damage that a trade boycott could do to Australia. The charge of unsportsmanlike behaviour was withdrawn. The English team had an empire at its disposal and it was happy to use its sinews.
International sport harbours within itself a tension between the amour propre of the nation and the chivalric code of the sport. In normal times, this tension is contained or held in abeyance; nationalist rivalry can play out within the bounds of the contest and be rehearsed in microcosm. Sometimes, though, geopolitics trumps the civilities of sport. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Western countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because they were happy to use sport to poke the bear in the eye.
Recently, India skirmished with Pakistan, citing the terrorist killings in Pahalgam as a provocation. When the two countries stopped firing missiles at each other, security experts agreed, in the parlance of cricket, to call it a draw. It is in the long aftermath of Operation Sindoor that the Asia Cup is being played. India could have skipped the tournament, given Pakistan’s participation. The Indian case for Operation Sindoor had been that Pakistan had sponsored the terrorist massacre of civilians; the Indian government could, in a way consistent with this position, have argued that playing cricket with Pakistan would amount to normalising terrorism. The logical outcome of this position would have been a boycott of the Asia Cup. As Sushant Singh points out in his essay on the no-handshake affair, if Pakistani terrorism were deemed an existential threat, pulling out of the tournament would have been the logical response.
But India didn’t pull out. There were reasons for this. Jay Shah, the Indian home minister’s son, heads the International Cricket Council. For India as the hegemon of world cricket to pull out of the Asia Cup would be tantamount to the big boy on the block taking his toys home. India chose, instead, to finesse Pakistan. The Board of Control for Cricket in India delayed its decision to breach protocol by informing the match referee only minutes before the toss. It ambushed the Pakistan skipper into playing the match on India’s terms. With the toss upon him, it must have been hard for Salman Agha to respond to the match referee’s message without political advice. By giving match officials and the opposing captain no time to negotiate, the BCCI hustled them into having its way.
The BCCI must have calculated that Pakistan, a nation starved of international cricket for years on account of the threat of terrorist violence at home, would be chary of quitting the tournament. Even if it did, India could claim it had fulfilled its cricketing obligations by holding its nose and playing Pakistan. Given India’s iron grip on the revenues of world cricket, it was a reasonable bet that the ICC and its officials would go along, and they did. Pakistan’s demand that Andy Pycroft, the match referee who officiated the match and acted as the BCCI’s messenger, be suspended for its second match against the United Arab Emirates was turned down. Pakistan was fobbed off with a meeting with Pycroft and the rumour of an apology. When the Pakistan Cricket Board cited it as a reason for its continued participation in the tournament, tournament authorities briefed the press that it had merely been an expression of regret at the ‘miscommunication’ between Pycroft and the Pakistan captain, Agha, not an apology.
For the Government of India, which had signed off on the no-handshake instruction, this was the perfect outcome. It allowed the government to guard its patriotic flank against those who criticised it for its inconsistency in allowing the Indian team to participate in a tournament that included Pakistan. For the viewing public, India had both registered its displeasure and had the satisfaction of pulverising Pakistan in a lopsided game. No one old enough to remember Indo-Pak ODI matches in Sharjah can doubt the toxic power of victory and defeat in these limited-overs contests.
Given the disarray of Pakistani cricket in recent times and India’s T20 depth, a win was near-guaranteed. As Sushant Singh puts it in his piece, “[a]n easy victory against Pakistan on the cricket field generates visceral nationalist euphoria that no economic statistics can match.” To refuse to shake hands after losing a match would have made the team look ridiculous; as it was, Suryakumar Yadav could smile and plausibly say that there are things more important than sportsmanship.
For the nation-state, patriotism is more important than cricketing decorum. Netas will always tell cricketers that they are citizens first and sportsmen later. If pressed, nearly every athlete will accept that he or she is a citizen first. The trick is not to press them. The balance between patriotism and the spirit of the game is best sustained when national feeling is allowed to rumble underground like a powerful bass line that moves us without being turned into words. When Jasprit Bumrah bounced James Anderson and the English quicks tried to make him hop in return, only a liar would say that being desi didn’t ginger things up. But it was an in-game high, not an order from above.
To put a cricketer in a position where he finds himself saying that there are things more important than sportsmanship is to kill something. It is to be a commissar encouraging artists to declare that art must serve the fatherland. The nation-state rules us all, but sport, like art, holds out the possibility of a passing transcendence where, briefly, we aren’t only political creatures.
To see a cricket match as the continuation of a military campaign, to offer up its result as a tribute to a nation’s armed forces, is an odd sort of opportunism. What would Jay Shah or Rajeev Shukla, the acting president of the BCCI, have expected Yadav to say if India had lost? George Orwell could write that sport was “war minus the shooting” because he had no interest in sport. Anyone who follows sport knows that people who think that aren’t fans, they’re trolls. When Pakistan won that extraordinary Test in Chennai in 1999 and Chepauk’s spectators rose to cheer the twenty-two players who had made that contest possible, they weren’t performing ‘sportsmanship’, they were celebrating transcendence. Suryakumar Yadav and every cricketer who has taken the field for India know that; the men in charge of Indian cricket don’t.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com