Asia | Banyan
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are weaponising cricket
In South Asia, sports is geopolitics by other means
February 12th 2026
THE LATEST edition of the men’s cricket World Cup in the short, T20 format started on February 7th with three matches headlined by the game’s biggest subcontinental stars. India, the indomitable host country, took on that other great cricketing nation, America. Pakistan battled the Netherlands. And facing off against the once-great West Indies was… Scotland?
Aye, really. Bangladesh was swept out of the tournament last month. For a while there were rumours that Pakistan, too, might be replaced. What do these countries have in common? They are on bad terms with their domineering neighbour, India, they are sick of being pushed around, and they pushed back. The result has reduced a global event to a stage for South Asia’s pathologies.
In December the Indian Premier League, a wildly lucrative domestic tournament, held an auction of cricketers. The Kolkata team purchased Mustafizur Rahman, a Bangladeshi bowler nicknamed Fizz. That caught the attention of a particularly rabble-rousing type of personage: the out-of-work politician.
Sangeet Som, a former state legislator from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), took issue with Kolkata’s purchase of a Bangladeshi player. Other political entrepreneurs soon piled in. Within days the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which runs the league, forced Kolkata to drop Fizz.
Relations between India and Bangladesh have been worsening since 2024, when Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the Muslim country’s autocratic prime minister, fled to India amid massive protests. Indian media have since been playing up incidents of violence against Hindus in Bangladesh. Bangladeshis, for their part, are angry at India’s willingness to shelter Sheikh Hasina. The Indian government would like to improve relations, but its own media—and low-level functionaries like Mr Som—are making it difficult.
Bangladesh, with its back up, asked to move its World Cup matches to Sri Lanka, arguing that if India could not guarantee the security of one player, it could hardly protect an entire squad. But the International Cricket Council (ICC), the sport’s global governing body, saw no merit in the argument and excluded Bangladesh from the contest, replacing it with Scotland, the next highest-ranked team.
Then Pakistan’s government flailed its willow, banning its team from playing a fixture against India. Relations between the two, never warm, reached new levels of iciness after a short war in May that both sides believe they won. The ostensible reason for boycotting the India match was to show solidarity with Bangladesh. More to the point, it was a way of harming its bigger neighbour. Matches between the two countries are the most watched in any cricket tournament. Advertising rates are set accordingly, with much of the benefit accruing to India. By pulling out, Pakistan hit India where it hurt.
After ten tense days of furious backchannel negotiations, Pakistan said that it would play India after all, as scheduled. And, as part of the deal, Bangladesh will face no financial penalty for its impertinence (though it is still out of the World Cup). Cricket’s greatest show will go on, sort of.
Yet the brinkmanship has dragged cricket ever deeper into South Asian geopolitics. Like all teams except England and Australia, Pakistan survives on cash from the ICC. By initially pulling out, its government calculated that sporting and financial losses are nothing to the rare pleasure of upsetting India’s Hindu-nationalist establishment.
That is because India’s cricket board, though nominally independent, acts in practice as a wing of the BJP. Until the end of 2024, its boss was Jay Shah, the son of India’s home minister, Amit Shah, who is Narendra Modi’s right-hand man. Mr Shah junior now runs the ICC. Pakistan’s cricket board, meanwhile, is run by the country’s interior minister.
Observers seeking to understand South Asia’s dysfunctional relationships can hardly be blamed for being overwhelmed by the baroque nature of the region’s multifarious hatreds. Eight decades of wars, coups and terrorism are superimposed upon the centuries of religious and linguistic grievances that stir each country’s political compulsions. Onlookers should turn instead to cricket. The rules of the sport are considered, by those who do not have the pleasure of loving the game, to be somewhat convoluted. But they at least follow the logic of pursuing victory. South-Asian geopolitics, on the other hand, is increasingly a negative-sum game. ■
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