If you’re looking for the most politicized international sport, the sport most ridden with the visceral furies that pit nation against nation, look no further than cricket.

International cricket has a smaller pool of adherent nations than almost all other major sports and is on a par with baseball in terms of the number of countries that take it seriously. Yet it is today a rancorous mess. And the protagonists of this mess are nations of the Indian subcontinent.

In truth, as with all problems in this benighted region, the troubles that beset cricket can be traced directly to India and Pakistan, sullen neighbors who have gone to war with each other four times since their independence from Britain in 1947.

In that period, remarkably, they have also played against each other at cricket some 212 times, though the last time India’s national team played on Pakistani soil was in July 2008. Since then, India has refused to play cricket in Pakistan, citing Pakistan’s sponsorship of anti-India terrorist groups as well as a well-founded belief that Indian players would not be safe from physical harm. Games between the two countries tend now to be played at neutral venues, under the aegis of international tournaments featuring teams from other countries.

India and Pakistan fought a brief military skirmish from May 7-10 last year after India bombed terrorist bases in Pakistan. This was shortly after a massacre of tourists in Indian Kashmir by Islamist jihadi terrorists who entered from across the country’s border with Pakistan. This skirmish ended in a stalemate and drew international attention less for the intensity of the combat than for U.S. President Donald Trump's preening insistence on taking credit for the ceasefire between New Delhi and Islamabad.

A bizarre feature of India-Pakistan relations is that they continue to play cricket against each other even as they fight on the battlefield or in the mountains of Kashmir. And so it came to pass that they played each other in the Asia Cup cricket competition just four months after the May skirmish.

The cup was hosted by the United Arab Emirates, so often the neutral venue for Asian cricket contests. With a large expat South Asian population in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, crowds at the UAE stadia have a distinctly subcontinental demography. But in a departure from previous practice — and also from the protocol of cricket, which regards itself as a gentleman’s game — players from the Indian team refused to shake hands with their Pakistani opponents either before or after the matches they played against each other. This performative show of patriotic disdain was seen by Pakistanis (who tend to think it is perfectly fine to send murderous jihadis into India) as unsportsmanlike. By predictable contrast, it was lauded as fitting by a majority of the Indian public, who chose to believe that shaking hands with the enemy is somehow far worse than playing cricket against him.

India clobbered Pakistan at the Asia Cup, but then refused to receive the winner’s trophy from Mohsin Naqvi, president of the Asian Cricket Council. Naqvi happens, also, to be the federal interior minister of Pakistan, which made him anathema to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the body that runs Indian cricket. The BCCI, it should be said, is entirely subservient to India’s ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP government. Naqvi refused to step aside at the award ceremony and delegate his trophy-bestowing duties to someone less toxic. Instead, he took the trophy home with him to Pakistan and has refused all Indian requests thereafter to part with it.

The theater of the absurd did not end there. Fast-forward to Jan. 3 of this year and to a new problem-country for India. Bangladesh, to India’s east, was descending into what was starting to look like civic chaos, with Hindu Bangladeshis increasingly the targets of Islamist mobs. Indian public opinion, and the BJP’s hair-trigger Hindu sensibilities in particular, was incensed by all of this. The BCCI, taking instructions from the Indian government, ordered the Kolkata Knight Riders — a private franchise that participates in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the world’s most glamorous cricket league — to cancel the contract of its sole Bangladeshi player. The Knight Riders complied and canceled the contract.

Is your head spinning yet? If so, tough luck. The story gets even more complicated.

The name of the canceled player was Mustafizur Rahman, known to cricket’s aficionados as “The Fizz.” As news of his jettisoning from the IPL hit Bangladesh, the nation’s own cricket governing body, the Bangladesh Cricket Board, reacted with nationalist fury. Indignant and incensed — and egged on, it seems, by the Pakistan Cricket Board — they declared that the Bangladesh team would not travel to India in February to participate in the Cricket World Cup, which India is co-hosting with neighboring Sri Lanka. All of Bangladesh’s first-round matches — against England, the West Indies, Nepal and Italy — were scheduled to be played at Indian stadia. The Bangladeshis demanded that all these games be shifted to Sri Lanka. If not, they would pull out of the World Cup altogether. India, they argued, wasn’t safe for Bangladeshi cricketers.

The BCCI, not accustomed to being told what to do by cricket boards that it regards as subservient, refused point-blank. The matter was then kicked upstairs, to the International Cricket Council, the governing body for the entire global game.

But guess who’s the chairman of the ICC? It is one Jay Shah, all of 38 years old, whose only qualification for running a cricket body — in fact, for running anything at all — is that he is the son of Amit Shah, home minister in the Modi government in New Delhi and the second-most powerful politico in India. It’s no surprise, then, that the ICC told Bangladesh to take a hike. Bangladesh pulled out of the World Cup, as it had threatened to do and was replaced by Scotland.

At this stage, India’s old nemesis Pakistan decided to rear its perverse head. Expressing solidarity with its fellow Muslim nation, Bangladesh, its cricket board announced that the Pakistan team would boycott its own game against India to have been played in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Feb. 15. A Sri Lankan venue was chosen for this marquee match because the Pakistanis had refused, from the outset, to send their team to play in India.

This refusal by Pakistan sent the ICC into a fiscal tizzy. An India-Pakistan fixture has a total commercial value — from broadcasting and advertising rights — of as much as $250 million. This money is funneled back into the global game. In fact, India-Pakistan games generate so much money that they can be said, in effect, to bankroll world cricket. While the BCCI gobbles up about a third of the kitty, the rest is distributed to the other, mostly impoverished, cricket-playing countries, including Pakistan. In refusing to play India, Pakistan was cutting off its nose to spite its face.

Predictably, and inevitably, the Pakistanis came to their senses. Sri Lanka’s prime minister spoke bluntly to his Pakistani counterpart — reminding him of Sri Lanka’s support for Pakistani cricket over the years, especially of Sri Lanka’s willingness to play in Pakistan at times when other teams, fearing terrorist threats, would not. He also made clear that the parlous Sri Lankan economy would be hit hard by cancellations of hotels and flights by the tens of thousands of mostly Indian cricket fans who had booked to watch the game in Colombo. And so, Pakistan climbed down. The match took place. Pakistan duly lost, as is its custom these days against India, sending all of Pakistan into national depression.

And in case you’re wondering: No, absolutely not. The Indian players did not shake hands with the Pakistanis.

© The Japan Times