On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition, filed by four law students, claimed that playing the match so soon after the Pahalgam terror attack and Operation Sindoor would demean the sacrifices of armed personnel and was “against national interest”.
The Court declined to intervene. “It’s a match, let it be,” Justice J.K. Maheshwari remarked, refusing to elevate the petition into a question of constitutional urgency. That refusal, however, doesn’t end the matter: the call to stop the match points to the fraught place cricket occupies in India today, where the sport is no longer just a sport but an annex of politics itself.
The petitioners also argued that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) must be brought under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, in line with the new National Sports Governance Act 2025. For many decades the BCCI has prided itself on being a private body, formally outside government control, yet informally intertwined with it through patronage, appointments, and access to resources. Over the years, this hybrid arrangement has allowed political parties to capture the administration of Indian cricket without subjecting it to the mechanisms of accountability under public law. The outcome is an entity that’s a chimaera: neither purely autonomous nor transparently regulated.
This political capture has contributed to a situation in which the sport has become indistinguishable from political theatre. If the BCCI were more genuinely independent and if its leadership were less frequently a stepping-stone for politicians, (men’s) cricket in India may still have had the ability to separate itself from the ebbs and flows of diplomatic posturing. Instead, the BCCI has invited politics onto the field by making itself an extension of political patronage.
To be sure, cricket has always been more than a game. Since the colonial era, it has carried the weight of identity and nationalism. In The Tao of Cricket, Ashis Nandy argued that cricket in India became a way of playing with colonial inheritance rather than rejecting it. Matches against England in the mid-20th century were arenas where newly independent Indians performed parity with their former rulers. With Pakistan, the sport inherited and refracted the trauma of Partition. Every bilateral series has carried more baggage than bat and ball.
Yet the history of India-Pakistan matches is also one of conviviality. For every moment when politicians have sought to cancel tours, there have been times when cricketing exchanges have thawed frozen relations. India’s tours of Pakistan in 2004 and Pakistan’s participation in the 1996 World Cup hosted in India were moments when ordinary spectators could cheer a cover drive irrespective of the batsman’s passport. The very fact that governments have sometimes chosen to use cricket as a tool of rapprochement suggests that the sport holds a special capacity to transcend political divides.
Sport itself has always sat at the junction of rivalry and fellowship. Aristotle saw games as part of leisure, necessary for the cultivation of civic virtue. The Olympic Truce of ancient Greece, revived in modern times, embodied the idea that contests on the field could suspend contests off of it. The South African example after apartheid, when Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, showed how sport could heal a wounded polity.
Against this backdrop, the call to cancel the India-Pakistan match risks impoverishing cricket of its potential to build bridges. To say that playing Pakistan dishonours Indian soldiers is to treat sport as a mere extension of politics. Sport is not reducible to politics: it’s also a space where citizens can experience one another as competitors, not enemies. That distinction matters. A good game of cricket can remind people that beyond the rhetoric of national security, there are human beings bowling yorkers and lofting sixes, acts that spectators from both sides can cheer, grumble about, and analyse over endless replays.
This isn’t to deny that politics already suffuses cricket. The selection of venues, the sponsorship deals, the choreography of opening ceremonies — all carry political weight. Nor can one ignore that militant groups have sometimes targeted cricket precisely because of its symbolic importance. But to cancel matches on the grounds that politics exists is to double down on cynicism. It is to concede that no space can remain where ordinary citizens of India and Pakistan might encounter each other beyond the logic of hostility.
The BCCI’s long entanglement with political elites makes it harder to resist such calls. When cricket administrators behave like political courtiers, it becomes easier for petitioners to argue that cricket is an extension of the state and must therefore obey the same dictates of foreign policy. But precisely because the BCCI has failed to safeguard cricket’s autonomy, the rest of us must insist that the game not be reduced to a political pawn.
The petitioners invoked “national interest” and “national dignity” yet the Constitution of India doesn’t enshrine dignity in the form of cancelling sports fixtures. It enshrines dignity through the protection of rights, the pursuit of fraternity, and the preservation of liberty. Article 51 even enjoins the state to foster respect for international law and promote peace. Seen in that light, playing cricket with Pakistan is not an affront to dignity but an affirmation of the constitutional aspiration to fraternity across borders.
If anything undermines dignity, it’s the reduction of sport to a theatre of grievance. It’s the refusal to allow people an arena where they can cheer together, even if for rival teams. National interest is not served by foreclosing every possible space of conviviality: it’s served by demonstrating that India is confident enough in its own constitutional foundations to play, to lose, to win, and to play again.
The Supreme Court was right to dismiss the petition with a simple phrase: “It’s a match, let it be.” That lightness is what cricket needs in India today. To insist that every over bowled is a statement of geopolitics is to impoverish both politics and cricket.
