'Broken': Sports no longer tool of diplomacy

CHENNAI: Over the last few months, there has been a growing clamour for the Indian cricket team to refuse to play Pakistan and it grew before their first match in Asia Cup group stage. India comfortably won the game — there is honestly a noticeable difference in the skill levels of both teams — but what caught the eye was what happened on the sidelines. India’s refusal to shake hands or exchange pleasantries, a kind of common sporting brotherhood.

After the match, Suryakumar Yadav expressed his solidarity with the families affected by the attack in Pahalgam in April. Following that attack the sporting relations between India and Pakistan nosedived. An Indian cricket team twice boycotted Pakistan in a meet in England.

The Pakistan hockey team — usually habitual travellers to India — skipped the Asia Cup earlier this month; relationships are not the same anymore. Even in a heightened state of tension, sport has been used as a diplomatic tool to try and put peace at the forefront.

From 1987, when Pakistan president, Zia-ul-Haq, travelled to India to watch a Test featuring the two countries to 1996, when the two teams joined forces to play a game in Sri Lanka to show it was safe. On Sunday, India and Pakistan will meet again at the Asia Cup. If there’s another round of snubbing extended hands, it may well be a new normal. 

Remember that time in 1996 when India and Pakistan became one team — marketed as a Wills XI (Ind/Pak) — and played a cricket match against Sri Lanka before the World Cup? Saeed Anwar opened with Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble shared spin-bowling duties with Aamir Sohail and Ajay Jadeja came out to bat either side of Ijaz Ahmed and Rashid Latif. It was a sensational show of South Asian solidarity with a heavy dollop of cricketing diplomacy to show Sri Lanka was a safe place to visit.

Or that time when hockey players from across the border would seek out their Indian counterparts for meals in the gullies of Old Delhi. The reason? Buying sarees for their wives back home.

More recently, Shaheen Shah Afridi, during the last edition of the Asia Cup in 2023, presented Jasprit Bumrah with a gift for the birth of his child. “Love,” the Pakistan pacer had posted on the gram. “And peace.” Want a different sport?

In April, Neeraj Chopra sent Arshad Nadeem an invitation to participate in a javelin event named after the 2021 Summer Games champ. Staying with Chopra and Nadeem, cast your minds back to the immediate aftermath of the Paris Games when their mothers stole the internet.

“Neeraj is like my son,” said Nadeem’s mother. “Arshad is also like our child,” said Chopra’s mother. Or take your minds back to the early 2000s when Rohan Bopanna and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi united as one at a Challenger event in the US. In 2007, they rekindled their partnership before embracing the tagline given to them. ‘Indo-Pak Express’.

Throughout the above-mentioned time period — spanning more than three decades — India and Pakistan have exchanged cross-border hostilities. There have been major attacks, including Pulwama (2019), Pathankot (2016) and Mumbai (2008). Each time these incidents took place, hostilities between the governments resumed and tension lingered in the air. But athletes didn’t veer away from pre-match etiquette, boycotts never dominated the discourse and elected leaders viewed sport as a diplomatic tool to see if a thaw could be engineered. In other words, they tried to use sport as a vehicle for peace, they showed what sport could do even when backchannel lobbying had ground to a halt.

In 2010, Bopanna and Qureshi even started a ‘Stop War Start Tennis’ initiative. Later on, it became an organisation aimed at rehabilitating people whose lives were affected by weapons of war. All this is enough evidence to suggest that there is a clear divide between the governments of India and Pakistan and the proud sportspersons representing these two countries. A sledgehammer was taken to that particular evidence at the Asia Cup last Sunday when the Indian team refused one of cricket’s oldest unwritten routines. The post-match handshake.

Latif, one player who featured in that combined India-Pakistan XI in 1996, is rather intimate with how his relations were with the Indians. “We also played after tensions at the border but it has never happened that we didn’t meet Indian players after the match,” he tells this daily.

“Leave alone meeting, we even sat in each others’ rooms. This ‘no handshake’ by the Indian team has set the wrong precedent.”

The former wicket-keeper goes on to say this wouldn’t have happened if the Men In Blue had the likes of Rahul Dravid, Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma in their ranks. “There are several viral videos where Virat and Rohit could be seen with Pakistan players before and after games. They were exchanging shirts and bats.”

Something fundamentally changed between the two countries on the evening of April 22, 2025. Twenty-six civilians were gunned down in Pahalgam, a tourist destination in Kashmir. The attack invited a very strong response from the Indian government; they targeted ‘terrorist camps’ — in their own words — across the LoC as well as deeper inside Pakistan (their government has continued to deny any involvement for the targeted killings at Pahalgam). The two countries faced off as a result and exchanged missile strikes, drone attacks and had fighter jets manning the skies.

Chopra was abused on social media for inviting Nadeem, ‘a Pakistani’. His mother was targeted and his integrity was questioned. A senior Indian cricket team boycotted two games versus Pakistan during a World Championship of Legends tournament in England. Pakistan’s senior hockey team — a side that has regularly kept coming to India irrespective of the prevailing atmosphere — cited ‘security issues’ and skipped the Asia Cup (a World Cup qualifier) earlier this month.

India, of course, hasn’t officially announced the end of Operation Sindoor, their military response to Pahalgam. It’s on pause. Few months after Operation Sindoor began, Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army head, delivered a thinly veiled nuclear threat when he was in the US. The language had very quickly changed from one of cautious bonhomie to that of jingoism; ultra nationalistic voices began to dominate the narrative.

But in decades gone by, sporting relationships thrived, even in the backdrop of escalations. Heck, Zia-ul-Haq, the Pakistan president, came to India in 1987 to watch a Test match. During his time here, politicians from both countries promoted an unofficial clarion call labelled ‘cricket for peace’. One story goes that he was invited by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), with some help from the then Soviets, and all stakeholders used the Test as the background to discuss geopolitics during a state of heightened tensions. That theme has continued over the decades. In 2011, the Indian PM, Manmohan Singh, and Pakistan PM, Yousuf Raza Gilani, met the two teams before a World Cup semifinal in Mohali.

In 2024, there’s an apocryphal story about Chopra receiving an invitation from the Indian ambassador during his time at the Paris Games. Chopra, ever the statesman, is believed to have said, ‘Mere bhai ko invite karna padega... Nadeem,’ (you have to invite my brother, Nadeem, as well). The ambassador took both of them out to dinner.

Not many Indian athletes have travelled to Pakistan as many times as V Baskaran, the former hockey captain who went on to become coach of the national team. “12 times,” he says. “I have a lot of friends there, I’m still in touch with them. I talk to former hockey players from Pakistan. I just don’t understand this (calls of boycott).”

Abhinav Bindra, India’s first individual Olympic gold-medallist, is intimate about the role of sport and its powerful place in society. “Sport,” he tells this daily, “has a unique role in society. At it’s best, it allows athletes to compete fiercely on the field while still respecting one another beyond it. This spirit is not confined to any single country or rivalry, it is something we see across the world and it reflects the Olympic values of friendship, respect and excellence.”

A member of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Athlete Commission, the 42-year-old readily accepts the ‘national pride’ aspect of sport but that isn’t its only function.

“National pride is an important part of sport but it is equally important to remember that the larger purpose of sport is to bring people together. When athletes demonstrate respect and solidarity it reinforces the idea that sport can be a unifying force even in difficult times.”

In less than 24 hours, Suryakumar Yadav & Co. will again be faced with the choice of exchanging pleasantries with the Pakistan captain. After the match, cameras will be trained to see if the ‘no handshake’ policy — the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) alleged that it was a decision taken by New Delhi — was a one-off or a new normal.

If it’s indeed a new normal, it could have widespread ramifications not on the cricket field but with India’s stated ambitions of hosting the Commonwealth Games as well as the Olympics. What happens if India and Pakistan are scheduled to face each other at Los Angeles?

There were heightened crossborder tensions in the middle 1980s with Operations, Brasstacks, Rajiv and Meghdoot, all of them Indian military actions. That, though, didn’t stop cricketers coming on tours or vice versa. In fact, in an exhibition match in Mumbai in 1987, Tendulkar came onto the field in Mumbai donning a Pakistan jersey. The then teen fielded for Imran Khan’s men as they were a fielder light.

Imagine that happening now.

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