Silence of an India-Pak handshake

IN the long, often turbulent chronicle of India-Pakistan cricket, there are moments that echo louder than the runs scored or the wickets taken. Cricket between these two nations is never just a game, never just the business of bat and ball.

It is a theatre of nations, a colosseum where pride, grievance and memory take their places beside the scoreboard. And in such an arena, the smallest gestures can loom larger than the mightiest innings. The Asia Cup brought to fore one such gesture — or rather, the absence of one. Not a boundary struck nor a catch clasped, but hands left hanging by their sides. The silence of a hand unshaken became the enduring image of the evening.

Pakistan board chief Mohsin Naqvi lodged a protest with the match referee, as though authority could compel courtesy. But courtesy is not a law to be enforced; it is an instinct, a matter of the heart.

The preamble to the ICC's Spirit of Cricket is invoked in such times. It suggests that players should shake hands before and after matches as a sign of mutual respect. Yet, even the word itself tells us what it is: a spirit, not a statute. No umpire's finger can raise or lower it.

A handshake offered without belief is little more than choreography — a hollow ritual to satisfy cameras. Cricket has always wrapped itself in ritual and players are bound by certain optics and norms.

Tosses are to be conducted on the very surface where the contest will unfold, for it is upon that strip of grass and earth that everything depends.

A boundary is not merely a scoring stroke but a line crossed, a recognition that the field has been stretched. To leave the ground, a batsman waits for the umpire's raised finger — a quiet, unquestioned finality.

These procedures lend rhythm and order to the game, shaping its theatre. Among them sits the handshake, no less symbolic. It is meant as a sign of respect between players, not necessarily as a bow to the nations they represent.

Yet, when the players of India and Pakistan meet, that distinction is difficult to hold. The handshake becomes more than sport — it becomes an image to be weighed, debated, replayed.

What unfolded in this Asia Cup was not pleasing, nor did it uphold the spirit in which cricket has clothed itself. But it was, in its own way, honest. The Indian players, and those who guided them, acted in accordance with conviction.

They believed that to extend a hand would be to extend something they did not feel. And conviction, however discomfiting, is not easily dismissed. A false courtesy may have soothed a few headlines but it would have left its hollowness visible to all. Better, perhaps, the silence of the gesture withheld.

It is not the first time cricket has been drawn into these cross-currents. From 1961 to 1978, India and Pakistan did not meet in a Test match. The border was tense, politics forbade it, and the fixture fell silent.

Yet, cricket found ways of maintaining its human ties. In the damp pavilions of English counties, Indians and Pakistanis shared dressing rooms. They battled the rain, the long bus rides, the indifferent crowds. They found camaraderie in tearooms and the shared exile in a foreign land.

The difference now was that the silence seemed deliberate. The Indian team played because it was obliged to, not because it wished to. The missing handshake was no more and no less than a muted protest, unspoken, yet unmistakable. It carried a message that could not be misread: we shall play the match, but we will not play the friend.

And yet, one cannot help wonder whether the protest might have been shaped into something more eloquent, something that would have lived beyond the evening's noise.

Black armbands might have borne quiet testimony to the victims of Pahalgam, whose grief shadowed this fixture. Prize money donated to the bereaved might have transformed the match into an act of remembrance, a gesture that outlives statistics and headlines alike.

Such actions carry a dignity that no silence can match. They are remembered long after the runs and wickets fade into almanacs.

Cricket, of course, has always spoken of its "spirit", but that spirit has never been fixed. It shifts with time, bends to circumstance, fades and reappears in unexpected ways. The invisible line is easily rubbed out and traced again elsewhere.

The absence of a handshake was one such rubbing out. It was not final, not fatal, but faintly sad. It left us with the sense that a line had been crossed — not with a bat, not with a ball, but with silence.

For cricket, in its noblest imagination, has always claimed to bridge divides. It has spoken of diplomacy by other means, of bringing people together when politics has failed.

Neville Cardus once wrote that cricket, in its best form, is "a moral lesson in the guise of a game." And perhaps it has been so, at moments. But on this night, the bridge was broken. India acted as it felt it must. Pakistan responded as it felt it should. The result was not reconciliation but distance — another stretch of silence across the boundary line.

It is worth remembering, too, that this silence was not universal. Within the ropes, bat met ball, spinners spun their webs, fielders strained every sinew to cut off singles. The mechanics of the game went on.

It was before the toss and after the final ball that the silence gathered its meaning. Cricket, like any theatre, has its formal beginning and end — and it was here, in the curtain calls, that the gesture was withdrawn.

The deeper truth, perhaps, is that cricket cannot always carry the burdens we heap upon it. It is a game of bat and ball, not of treaties and borders. Sometimes we ask it to stand for things it cannot say, to bridge gulfs that politics cannot cross. And when it falters, as it did here, it leaves us with this image: two teams, two convictions, and a silence where there might have been a handshake.

But cricket endures precisely because it reflects life in its contradictions. It contains moments of grace — the batsman who lifts his cap to an opponent's spell, the bowler who helps a rival to his feet. And it contains moments of withdrawal — hands left by their sides, silences that speak. In them, the game speaks of the frailties and strengths of the people who play it.

This image will join the long gallery of India-Pakistan encounters — not just the cover drives and yorkers, but also the silences that speak. It reminds us that cricket's spirit is not fixed law but shifting sand: sometimes it bridges, sometimes it divides. On this night, it chose silence.

The unshaken hand spoke not of reconciliation but of distance — a refusal that will pass into memory, debated and interpreted, until time softens its edges. Until then, it remains: a moment caught between nations, a withheld gesture and a silence that echoed louder than any cheer.

Shishir Hattangadi is former Captain, Mumbai cricket team.