When India plays cricket with Pakistan, it has to be War Minus the Shooting, as Mike Marqusee put it in his book of that title. The only surprising thing is that it still manages to surprise us. When a batsman marks a half-century by pointing towards an imagined enemy, mimicking the firing of a machine gun, as Sahibzada Farhan did, it thrills before it shocks. When Haris Rauf mimes an airplane falling out of the sky, it titillates before it disgusts.
By all accounts, the sports-watching world wanted India and Pakistan to play each other, as evidenced by the feeble response to the boycott calls. And yet, when it happened, there was a sense of being underwhelmed. Not by the lack of a sporting contest, but by the emptiness it left viewers feeling after they had invested so much in it.
To be sure, Pakistan are not the team they once were. The aura of Imran Khan and his cornered tigers may never be replicated, but this is not the only reason why the rivalry has fizzled out. When you deny sport its reason for existence—humans being playful, energetic and alive—by burdening it with a weight it is not designed to carry, you do not give it a chance to touch you.
Sport has been bent to fit man’s narrative from the time it existed. But the story it told has not always been so hollow.
When Cassius Clay became Mohammad Ali, his fists spoke for every black person who did not have a voice. When Billy Jean King took on Bobby Riggs, her serve was a demand for gender parity. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the Olympic podium in 1968, barefoot and with black gloves raised, they spoke truth to power.
Sports and politics can never be separated. But the weaponisation of sport to the point when it becomes a mere symbol is a different and dangerous business.
How is it that otherwise delightful young men such as Shubman Gill and Abhishek Sharma reach a point where they refuse to even shake hands with their brothers from across a contested border, where they would once have shared the toil of tilling fertile fields that fed the world?
“I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. “You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.”
Cut to 2025, and it should be bleeding obvious why the weaponisation of sport is a dangerous thing. “If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Yugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators,” wrote OrwelI. “I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism.”
And yet, sport is now more weaponised than ever. So much so that the players themselves do not, or cannot, see that they are pawns in a much larger, more insidious game being played out.
In team sport, there is little room for individualism: an Indian cricketer can no more refuse to play Pakistan because his heart bleeds for the victims of the Pahalgam attack than an American weightlifter refusing to lift weights against a Russian competitor in the Olympics. Each of these individuals has a conscience to answer to. And yet, they must toe the line in the pursuit of a greater common good in a way they may not agree with.
There is ugliness in sport because it does not exist in a vacuum. Every individual who takes the field is a product of history and geography, and this past is almost always painful. And yet, there is hope that one woman, man, or team can transcend all that is base in us and produce a moment in competition, under pressure, that uplifts the beholder.
This hope, a pure thing, is robbed of goodness when the simple act of swimming or running as fast as you can or kicking or bowling a ball as skilfully as your body will allow becomes an unwilling slave to politics. When you take the joy away, what’s left to play for?
Read all columns by Anand Vasu
Anand Vasu
Journalist who has covered more than 100 Test matches over 25 years
(Views are personal)