The War Without Guns: India-Pakistan cricket rivalry

When the captains of India and Pakistan lead their teams out onto the field at Dubai International Stadium for their Asia Cup clash on September 14, a billion people will hold their breath. For them, this is not merely a game of bat and ball; it is the closest thing the subcontinent has to war without guns.

The India-Pakistan rivalry is unique in world sport. Brazil may despise Argentina on the football field, and England may needle Australia in the ashes, but no other fixture carries the same cocktail of politics, memory, and raw emotion. In South Asia, a win becomes national glory, while a loss becomes national humiliation.

As Ashis Nandy famously wrote in “The Tao of Cricket”, “Indo-Pakistani matches are a substitute for war.” Scholars, politicians, and even generals have echoed this view. On the field, eleven men in whites (or now coloured kits) embody the hopes and grievances of nations divided in 1947.

The rivalry is ingrained in the memories of millions, from Javed Miandad’s last-ball six at Sharjah in 1986 to India’s victory over Pakistan in the 2011 World Cup. Each side has its litany of triumphs and humiliations, etched into collective memory like battle honours.

The irony, of course, is that cricket is also supposed to build bridges. “Cricket diplomacy” was a phrase coined during General Zia-ul-Haq’s surprise visit to Jaipur in 1987, where he used the pretext of watching a Test to meet Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 2004, Atal Bihari Vajpayee approved India’s tour of Pakistan as a gesture of goodwill.

For a brief moment, the subcontinent believed in reconciliation. However, goodwill rarely lasts. Cricket diplomacy has never resolved deeper disputes; at best, it has postponed crises, and at worst, it has been a bandage over a festering wound.

The Asia Cup is being held in Dubai, a safe neutral ground where passions can be contained, political tensions sidestepped, and television revenues flow unimpeded. This rivalry is also big business, with broadcasters bidding billions for the rights to screen these matches and advertisers saving their biggest campaigns for the week India plays Pakistan.

Politicians exploit the spectacle, whether by congratulating players, chastising boards, or spinning the result as proof of national destiny. One has to ask: who benefits from inflating this rivalry into an existential struggle? Certainly not the players, who often share friendships across the border.

Sunil Gavaskar recalls fond evenings with Zaheer Abbas; Wasim Akram is beloved by Indian fans as a commentator. Yet on the match day, they become warriors pressed into service by their respective national myths.

Abroad, the rivalry takes on new forms. In Birmingham, Manchester, or New Jersey, the stands are packed with British Asians and Pakistani Americans who wear their allegiance like armour. Many years ago, an India-Pakistan match in Dubai featured a cheering crowd of migrant labourers, half in Indian jerseys, half in Pakistani green. They ribbed each other mercilessly, but when a six landed in the crowd, they all scrambled together, laughing like brothers. The diaspora knows both the pain of division and the joy of proximity.

Who can forget that cricket itself is a colonial legacy? The British exported it as a civilising tool; the colonised embraced it as a means of revenge. Beating England at Lord’s was once the pinnacle of Indian pride. Now the greater thrill lies in beating Pakistan, for Pakistanis in beating India. The empire’s gift has been repurposed into the empire’s afterlife.

India today dominates the cricket economy, commanding ICC’s purse strings and the IPL’s global reach. Pakistan, by contrast, struggles with security concerns and shrinking venues. The rivalry is thus not only political but economic — a contest between two models of postcolonial modernity, one ascendant, the other beleaguered.

As a reporter, I have covered wars, elections, and assassinations, but some of my most vivid memories are of cricket. I recall sitting in a smoky newsroom in Cairo, listening to a crackling shortwave radio as India collapsed in Lahore. My Egyptian colleagues had no idea what the fuss was about, yet they could see my anguish.

Years later, in Amman, I shared tea with a Pakistani diplomat on the day Tendulkar dismantled Shoaib Akhtar. We smiled at each other, acknowledging that sport had succeeded where politics had failed: in giving us common language.

On September 14, when the captains of India and Pakistan lead their teams out onto the field, the world will witness this ritual once again. Children will stay up late, uncles will curse the television, and WhatsApp groups will hum with banter and abuse.

The match will be consumed not just as sport but as theatre, history, and prophecy rolled into one. And yet, we must remind ourselves that beneath the rhetoric, cricket is still just a game. The ball does not carry the weight of 1947, nor does the bat decide the fate of the subcontinent.

These are human beings, not soldiers. Their struggle is real but symbolic. In a better world, perhaps India and Pakistan could play each other as routinely as England and Australia do, without security scares or political caveats. Until then, the rivalry will remain what it is: the war that plays out in whites, watched by a billion, remembered forever.