India vs Pak Asia Cup: The silence of a hand unshaken

In the long history of India–Pakistan cricket, certain moments resonate more deeply than the runs scored or wickets taken. The Asia Cup delivered one such moment — not marked by a powerful boundary or a spectacular catch, but by hands left hanging at the sides. The absence of a handshake became the defining image of the evening.

Pakistan Cricket Board chief Mohsin Naqvi protested against the match referee, as if an official could enforce courtesy. However, the ICC’s Spirit of Cricket is a guideline, not a rule. It suggests that players shake hands as respect to opponents, but it cannot demand that sentiment be manufactured. A handshake without belief is little more than choreography.

What unfolded was not pleasant to the eye, nor did it uphold the spirit in which cricket has so often clothed itself. Yet the Indian players, and those who guided them, believed in the rightness of their act. And conviction, however discomfiting, is not easily dismissed.

This is hardly the first time cricket has been caught in such cross-currents. Between 1961 and 1978, India did not face Pakistan in a Test match. But those years did not sever the game’s human ties. In the English counties, Indians and Pakistanis shared dressing rooms, fought the rain, and chased the same weary bus rides. The nations stayed apart; the cricketers found ways to meet.

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Now, though, 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 said: we shall play the match, but not the friend.

Could their protest have taken a more lasting, more eloquent form? Black armbands might have borne quiet testimony to the Pahalgam victims. Prize money donated to the bereaved would have transformed the match into an act of remembrance. Such gestures endure beyond headlines; they outlive the noise of the moment.

Cricket has often spoken of its “spirit,” but that spirit has never been fixed. It shifts with time, bends with circumstance, fades and reappears. The invisible line is easily rubbed away, then traced again in different places. The absence of a handshake is one such rubbing out. Not final, not fatal, but faintly sad.

For in that moment, the game that has so often claimed to bridge divides found its bridge 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.

And yet, perhaps the truth is that cricket cannot always carry the burdens we heap upon it. It is a game of bat and ball, not of treaties. Sometimes, it is asked to stand for what nations cannot say. And when it falters, it leaves us with an image like this one: two teams, two convictions, and a silence where once there might have been a handshake.