Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : Team India Clenches Its Fist – and Stumps the Spirit of Cricket and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
The Indian cricket team’s refusal to shake hands with Pakistani cricketers does not advance diplomacy, justice or national interest, only makes it a pawn in Hindu nationalist politics.
The refusal of Indian players to shake hands with Pakistani cricketers during the February 15 match in Sri Lanka transcends a mere breach of etiquette; it signals a troubling shift in the role of sport amid rising hyper-nationalism in India. This act, rooted in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism, exploits Pakistan as a unifying enemy to obscure India’s pressing political and economic challenges, as Arundhati Roy has observed in her critiques of nationalism’s performative spectacles.
Such politicisation corrodes the ethical foundations of sport, transforming cricket, a historically shared cultural space, into a battleground for ideological posturing.
Partha Chatterjee’s insights into nationalism illuminate this phenomenon – the nation often constructs an imagined community that demands symbolic acts of allegiance, where even sportsmanship becomes a site of political contestation. In light of this, the refusal to shake hands is less about individual players and more a public performance of ideological loyalty, reflecting how cricket in India has been transformed into a simulated warzone where spectacles of Hindu nationalist vengeance are played out.
Yet history offers a compelling counter-narrative. Ramachandra Guha, in his extensive writings on cricket, highlights how the sport has long served as a bridge across political and cultural divides. The 1999 Cricket World Cup match between India and Pakistan, held shortly after the Kargil conflict, stands as a poignant example. Despite the fresh wounds of war, players engaged with dignity and mutual respect, embodying the spirit of cricket as a shared cultural inheritance rather than a proxy for conflict. This moment underscored sport’s potential to transcend political animosities and nurture fragile but meaningful human connections.
Similarly, “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” during the Cold War thawed decades of hostility between the United States and China, demonstrating how sports can catalyse dialogue and reconciliation in even the most intractable political contexts. Nelson Mandela’s embrace of rugby in post-apartheid South Africa further exemplifies sport’s power to unify divided societies by fostering a collective identity rooted in respect and hope rather than division.
These moments matter because they remind us that athletes are not merely extensions of the state, nor are spectators passive recipients of nationalist ideology. Again and again, players have defied diktats, fans have crossed borders in spirit if not in body, and sport has offered a fleeting but vital alternative imagination – one in which rivalry does not cancel respect. Against this long and generous history, the refusal to shake hands appears not as strength but as smallness, a contraction of possibility.
The silence of cricket’s governing bodies, particularly the International Cricket Council (ICC), in the face of such politicisation is deeply unsettling. The ICC’s claimed neutrality is undermined by the disproportionate influence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which dominates global cricket’s finances and governance. This imbalance allows political posturing to overshadow the game’s spirit, with exclusionary gestures like the refusal to shake hands becoming normalised rather than challenged. The ICC and the Indian cricket team are undermining the spirit of cricket by enabling political posturing over ethical sportsmanship. They are inflicting deep cuts on the moral playing field of all sports.
Sports do not exist outside politics, but they need not be reduced to petty political theatre. The refusal to shake hands does not advance diplomacy, justice or national interest. Instead, it diminishes the spirit of the game and reinforces antagonisms that cricket, at its best, has historically softened, rather than sharpened.
Cricket as a site of dialogue and camaraderie underscores the importance of preserving spaces where adversaries can, to borrow an old phrase, meet not with clenched fists but with open hands. To reclaim cricket’s role as a bridge, can the ICC and national boards move beyond the rhetoric of unity and confront the political manipulation of the game? Can the ICC, as the paramount authority in international cricket, intervene to reclaim the sport from the grip of Hindu nationalism that has transformed Indian cricket into a vehicle for political propaganda?
Dr Amrita Datta is Visiting Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is Associate Member, Global South Studies Centre, Cologne and the author of Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany: Why Move? Arani Basu teaches Sociology at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, India. He is the author of Understanding Propaganda: A Study of Media in Contemporary India.
This article went live on February eighteenth, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-five minutes past seven in the evening.
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