For the first time in an Asia Cup, India will play Pakistan in the final tonight. Going by the past two matches, it is unlikely that the Indian captain will neither shake hands after the toss with his Pakistani counterpart nor will the two teams engage in handshakes after the game.

The first time it happened, criticism, at least from neutral quarters, was directed against the Indian team’s churlishness and the twinning of politics and cricket. This was understandable but somewhat off the mark. The Indian team’s on-field action and captain Suyakumar Yadav’s subsequent justification were a reflection of BCCI’s and by extension the Indian government’s stand on Pakistan following the recent border conflict and the Pahalgam terror attack. The cricketers merely did what they were asked to do once India decided to play the match. The same applies to the Pakistani players who were asked to engage in brinkmanship during their game against UAE to ostensibly protest against the match referee of the India-Pakistan match.

The lack of agency of Indian cricketers is a symptom of the subservience of sportspersons to the State and the various sports federations that are also more often than not controlled by politicians. In a co-authored paper with Dibyendu Mishra and Joyojeet Pal, comparing Indian and American sportspersons, we argued that what Indian sportspersons can and cannot say about the government has a direct impact on their professional careers unlike in the US.

We conducted a study of the social media behaviour of Indian sportspersons and found that their most........

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