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 said, 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 a chimaera: an entity that's 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.

There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.

Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.

The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)

On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.

At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.

For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.

It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.

Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.

Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.

But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.

Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national government, the T20 World Cup will begin.