In the 1800s, the British Empire brought a game called cricket to its colonies: a sport that elicited joy and gave purpose to thousands of people stuck in a cheerless, mundane existence. In the Indian subcontinent, the sport resonated with the masses in an unprecedented wave, as it not only became a global platform for the people to demonstrate their spirit and talent, but more importantly it was a level playing field where South Asians could beat their colonial masters, and later, more advanced nations. Now, cricket has become an essential component of post-colonial South Asian identity.
The adoption and indigenization of a game like cricket is multidimensional; it involved changing the way the sport is publicized and managed, and in India this is deeply rooted in the ability of players from various class backgrounds to mimic elite Victorian values. At the same time, the players manage to maintain an intrinsic balance of national pride and team spirit that is unique to post-colonial cricket. India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the top international performers in the sport today, have managed to detach the Englishness from cricket so successfully that Ashis Nandy called the game an Indian one that was accidentally discovered by the British.
Apart from Bollywood, cricket seems to be the only other phenomenon that unifies religions, classes, and castes in the hierarchically fractured societies of the subcontinent. Politics and sports are not mutually exclusive spaces and the latter has often been used to accomplish objectives of foreign policy, for example the famed ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ which was crucial in regulating China-USA relations, and early boycotts of South African teams in various sports during Apartheid, where countries held their political morality over sporting grandeur. The term ‘cricket diplomacy’ was coined by Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq in 1987, when an India-Pakistan match was used as a pretext for unofficial talks between the two nations; however, the actual practice of using cricket as a diplomatic tool in Indo-Pak relations dates much further back than this.
Pakistan’s first tour to India was shortly after the former was awarded international Test status in 1952, but this caused trouble amongst supporters as the memories of pain and bloodshed caused during Partition were still fresh in their minds. This changed drastically in 1955, when the Wagah border crossing was opened to let around ten thousand Indian fans travel to Lahore to watch India’s tour of Pakistan, with special provisions made for those who lived in Amritsar to travel across the border every night to their homes. In the 1980s, the relations between the two countries were strained in part due to Pakistani support for the Khalistan movement in Punjab and their military exercise Operation Brackstacks. Yet the elites, bureaucrats, and politicians of both countries put aside these differences so that the two nations could jointly host the prestigious Cricket World Cup in the subcontinent for the first time in 1987.
However, cricket has also been criticized for its tendency to incite nationalist tensions both, between and within the two countries. Both nations tend to perceive accusations of misconduct in the sport as slurs to their sovereignty or national consciousness. For example, in 2001 when Sachin Tendulkar was banned from a match for alleged ball-tampering, effigies of the match referee Mike Denness were publicly burned on the streets, and led to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) threatening to withdraw their membership from the International Cricket Council (ICC); a move that had the potential of breaking the cricketing world. Within India itself, cricket has proven to be as divisive as it is unifying: Nandy calls it an ‘easy peg’ on which one can hang their nationalism. Scholars like Ramachandra Guha and Jayanta Sengupta have suggested that the growth of Indian cricket nationalism during the 1990s can be associated with the rise of Hindu nationalism and chauvinism which occurred at the same time — during this period, Shiv Sena leader Balasaheb Thackeray argued that Indian Muslims must support India in cricket over Pakistan to prove that they are not anti-national or Pakistani sympathizers. Nandy explains the phenomenon as thus: “Cheering for Pakistan in cricket is the way to express a different identity”. This attitude may now be shifting as illustrated during the 2007 World Cup, where the heartbreak that India faced after its elimination was felt by both Hindus and Muslims in the country, and was only mildly lightened due to Pakistan’s similar fate in the tournament.
Byrne and Keashly suggest that “citizen diplomats are important activists who intervene and transform conflict and act as catalysts for social change” — and cricket fans have time and again proved to be these citizen diplomats. Currently, cricket fans (including politicians) from both sides of the border on Twitter tracking the 2019 World Cup may be making countless memes and engaging in friendly banter on India’s success in the tournament vis-à-vis Pakistan’s struggle to perform, but their hope for an exciting Indo-Pak final has led to sympathy for the opposite team’s losses and support when they are playing well against other teams, especially England.
Government diplomacy and other such traditional methods of conflict resolution are focused largely on the international system and its state structures, but non-traditional methods that are employed in peacemaking such as Track II & III diplomacy engage with more intricate paradigms like individuals, groups, and the larger society. Governmental and police controls on Indo-Pak matches in both countries also strengthens the claim that cricket is a serious tool for Track II diplomacy — Presidents and Prime Ministers from both sides have, time and again, used matches as a platform for unofficial dialogue. For Track III diplomacy, which deals with people-to-people contact, it is believed that an increase in contact between the countries’ citizens can help mediate the negative stereotyping that currently acts as a barrier to peacebuilding. In the subcontinent, cricket has the potential to influence public opinion, which is crucial in the reconstruction of history and in how the country’s demographic views its opponents or ‘enemies’. For so many Indians, cricket provides a chance to travel to and explore a country that otherwise people would find no reason to visit, and tours have even been a reason for visa restrictions being waived in the past as well.
Business and trade also help conflict de-escalation, especially in most ethnopolitical conflicts where social and economic competition is high. The close linkage of large multi-national corporations with cricket sponsorship also engages the wider population in boosting these relationships — according to the POWA index global ranking, for the ongoing 2019 World Cup, Team India’s commercial sponsorship value impact is a whopping 350% more than Australia, which is the next best — Pakistan is ranked third on the same list. The Indian Premier League (IPL), which attracts the best cricketing talent and weighty sponsorships from across the globe, is the most-attended cricket league in the world — in 2015, the IPL contributed almost INR 11.5 billion to the country’s GDP. Perhaps the biggest cricket power play by Indians towards Pakistan is the snubbing of Pakistani players from the IPL after the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, a move that forced then Minister of External Affairs S. M. Krishna to officially deny government involvement with the tournament.
It’s important in this context to build on the notion that cricket can be useful in multi-track diplomacy for India, not just in their bilateral relations with Pakistan but with other established and upcoming cricketing countries. India has been a staunch promoter of soft power development in Afghanistan and has supported the conflict-ridden nation in the fields of education and healthcare, having used Bollywood and cricket as their main tools of diplomacy in the country. Currently, the cricket stadiums in Greater Noida and Dehradun serve as home grounds for the Afghan team. By asserting soft power in this manner, India has taken over Pakistan, whose foreign policy towards its other neighbour mostly relies on hard power. The 2018 Indo-Afghanistan Friendship Series held in Bengaluru had a two-fold significance: as the newest member of the ICC, this tour marked the rapid growth of the Afghan national team and strengthened its presence as a cricketing force before the World Cup. It also asserted India’s soft power influence in Afghanistan, the tour was also attended by the premiers of both nations, and in his statement, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged the potential that the Afghan cricket team has to become a nation-building institution. He said, “Today cricket is unifying force for the people of Afghanistan. India takes pride in being shoulder-to-shoulder with Afghanistan in this journey.”
Most recently in June 2019, India’s bilateral interactions with the Maldives have also incorporated cricket — as a gesture, Modi presented Maldivian President Solih with a cricket bat signed by the Indian national team, and promised to help the country build a cricket stadium to develop the sport — on the side, the two countries have been rapidly expanding the scope of their relations, with talks about a passenger-cum-cargo ferry service between Kochi and Male. Modi was also honoured with the highest Maldivian award for his contributions to the ties between the two countries.
Having surpassed England as the foremost cricketing power in the world, it is indubitable that India holds an extraordinary hegemony over the sport today, so much so that its participation or boycott of any tournament can make or break its success. The BCCI has been subject to heavy criticism on the lines of corruption and the international community has also begun to question its influence in the ICC — there are several instances of Indian officials having held the participation of their team as a hostage to strengthen their position in the Council. For example, Indian players are prohibited from participating in foreign cricket leagues, denying them the opportunity to host world-class players while at the same time encouraging and relying on the presence and expertise of foreign players in the IPL and other league tournaments in the country. The IPL itself has been riddled with corruption and fraud scandals from its inception, but this seems to have had no effect on viewership or sponsorship and the tournament carries on unscathed, growing more and more with every passing year. In this regard, India has been accused of “stifling the growth of international cricket”. By refusing to add the BCCI to its Olympic Association, it seems like Indian officials do not want first-class cricket to be accessible to other countries.
Keeping all this in mind, it is important that India refurbishes the way it uses cricket as a political device. With respect to its bilateral ties especially with Pakistan, it seems that India will continue to leverage cricket as a means of soft power diplomacy and that matches between the two countries will always be a neutral space where their leaders can engage in dialogues and negotiations. The Indian cricket team has and will continue to be a universal trendsetter for the sport and that is definitely a matter of national pride — but in the spirit of sportsmanship and for the longevity of the game, our officials need to loosen the reigns of their monopoly in cricket to allow for a more collaborative and equitable growth of the sport. Rather than restricting the development of cricket to its Neighbourhood First policy, it would be in India’s benefit to promote the globalization of cricket so as to involve more countries (like Afghanistan) in the growth of the sport, and more strategically to increase the scope of its cricket diplomacy outreach past South Asia to the rest of the world.
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Image Credits: Pakistan Today