Global cricket tournament gets embroiled in South Asian hostilities

NEW DELHI – An India-Pakistan match is the sizzling centrepiece of any cricket World Cup fixture. Tens of millions of dollars in advertisement revenue are generated from each clash that pits the two South Asian rivals against each other, and hundreds of millions of hearts hang on to each ball of the game.

But in an unprecedented heartbreak for cricket fans across the globe, the forthcoming ICC Men’s T20 World Cup co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka from Feb 7 to March 8 could well turn out to be the first World Cup fixture without a signature clash between the two cricket-crazed nations.

Pakistan has said

it will boycott its match with India in Colombo

on Feb 15. The ostensible reason is to express solidarity with Bangladesh, a country with which Islamabad has been eager to mend ties and where it seeks to undermine India’s influence after Bangladesh’s former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, seen as pro-India,

was ousted in 2024.

Bangladesh has already withdrawn from the tournament. This is because the International Cricket Council (ICC), which governs the game globally, refused to shift its matches from India to Sri Lanka after Dhaka said there was a “genuine security risk” to its cricketers if they were to play in India.

“It is a new low for the game,” said Mr Pradeep Magazine, a veteran cricket writer and author of the book Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey Through Modern India. “Cricket has always represented bonhomie despite all tensions, which was quite remarkable,” he told The Straits Times.

India and Pakistan

last played against each other at the 2025 Men’s Asia Cup

held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in September despite the two countries exchanging missile, drone and artillery fire for days earlier in the year following a terror attack in Kashmir.

The latest sorry turn in cricketing, many say, can be traced to a politically motivated decision taken by India.

In January, Kolkata Knight Riders, one of the teams in the Indian Premier League, a professional Twenty20 cricket league, was forced to drop its only Bangladeshi squad member – pacer Mustafizur Rahman – “as instructed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India” (BCCI).

The BCCI is among the world’s richest sports governing bodies and is closely linked to power corridors in India, given cricket’s importance, as well as the vast financial muscle that the sport commands in the country.

The instruction from the BCCI to drop Rahman was seen as retaliation for the assaults on Hindus in Bangladesh, a cause that the Bharatiya Janata Party has taken up vociferously and which has provoked public protests, including outside Bangladesh’s diplomatic missions in India.

An angry Bangladesh upped the ante by saying its cricket players would not travel to India for the tournament, and asked the ICC to move its matches in India to Sri Lanka.

Such an arrangement is not unprecedented. India and Pakistan play at neutral venues whenever one of them hosts an ICC tournament. This arrangement was arrived at after India refused to travel to Pakistan to play in the Champions Trophy in 2025 and the two eventually played their matches in the UAE.

But the ICC did not accede to the Bangladeshi request, stating there was no “credible security threat” to its players in India. It replaced Bangladesh with Scotland in the tournament fixture.

This decision has renewed questions about India’s dominance over the ICC. While the council is meant to be independent, its decisions have often been perceived as favouring India, which generates an estimated 80 per cent of the game’s global revenue.

India has such an outsized influence over the ICC that it has been at times even derided as the “Indian Cricket Board” or a “wholly owned subsidiary of the BCCI”.

Indians also hold prominent offices within the ICC, further raising questions about India’s influence. Mr Jay Shah, a former BCCI secretary and son of Home Minister Amit Shah, is the current chairman of the ICC, and Mr Sanjog Gupta, an Indian broadcasting professional, is the body’s CEO.

Mr Magazine said the ICC could have been “more sensitive” to Bangladesh’s concerns and let them play in Sri Lanka. “I think that was where a wiser decision could have been taken. Maybe they didn’t expect that it would escalate to this level but that is how things are these days with nationalism and jingoism playing such a huge role in decision-making,” he added.

Pakistan’s insistence on not playing India at the tournament on Feb 15 has sent shockwaves through the cricketing world.

The ICC has threatened to levy sanctions, the details of which are still unclear. Pakistan risks losing millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue and could even face a temporary suspension, which would bar its teams from participating in international cricket under the ICC’s authority.

It is a price the country seems willing to pay to challenge both India’s hold over global cricket and its influence over Bangladesh, however effective the strategy may eventually prove to be.

Pakistani author Nadeem Farooq Paracha welcomed his country’s move to boycott its match with India as “a clever response to toothless ICC and its master, the BCCI”. “This will put them in a fix. A checkmate move,” he wrote on X.

“It is an opportunity which Pakistan has seized given its ongoing efforts to mend fences with Bangladesh,” said Professor Moonis Ahmar, the founder and executive director of the International Relations Academy in Karachi.

“Bangladesh’s decision not to play in India made Pakistan happy. Had Pakistan agreed to play India, it would have sent a wrong message to Dhaka,” he told ST.

Under Ms Hasina’s regime, Dhaka’s relations with Islamabad were at best strained, given their difficult past. Once part of the same country, the two nations went through a violent separation in 1971 when Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan.

Until Ms Hasina’s sudden departure in August 2024, ties between the two countries were bogged down by the bitter legacy of Bangladesh’s Liberation War, during which the Pakistani military and supporting militias wrought a horrific crackdown on Bangladeshi nationalists.

But meanwhile, backdoor parleys are still on between the ICC and Pakistan, and other stakeholders, to find a resolution.

“Even those in India who want Pakistan to be punished, or Pakistanis who want India to be punished, they all look forward to the clash,” added Mr Magazine. “If the match does not go ahead, it will be a sad loss for cricket.”