At the December auction, Kolkata Knight Riders signed Mustafizur Rahman, a Bangladeshi fast bowler who had already played several seasons in the Indian Premier League. The franchise is co-owned by Shah Rukh Khan, no empty fact in a climate where cricket, cinema, religion and nationality rarely stay separate for long. Relations between the two countries had soured, and the killing of a Hindu man in Bangladesh had lit anger and protest in India. Mustafizur had no part in any of it. Within weeks he became a convenient body on which to write the quarrel – chewed over on prime-time panels by men who had never set foot in Dhaka and were not defending a country so much as enjoying an evening. It was said often enough that saying it became the argument. In January the cricket board instructed the franchise to release him, and it complied. Dhaka pulled the tournament off its screens. The quarrel came to rest on Mustafizur, onto whom a grievance he had no part in was transferred and made to fit. Diplomacy turned up, as it now tends to, after the verdict.

The noise was considerable; what is worth noticing is how little it needed. No ministry of propaganda, censor’s pencil or midnight call to an editor’s home was required. Only a press doing by reflex what it now does without being asked: turning a neighbour into a symbol, attaching a distant grievance to an available face, and moving on before anyone counts the cost. The damage was cumulative — one more lesson that the country next door is an insult to be answered rather than a place where people wake up and go to work.

To see why a cricket contract can do this, start with what a border is here. It is never just a line in the dirt. It is an old argument no one won, a wound that taught itself to look like a fact. The map was drawn in a hurry by an empire on its way out, and the haste is still in it. What it settled on paper it left unsettled underneath – who belongs, what was lost, what may be remembered aloud. The maps still smell faintly of the eraser. To report a quarrel here without translating it – between people split by a flag yet joined by language, food, kinship, the same songs at a wedding – was always to report it wrong. The work of South Asian journalism, at its best, was translation: making the quarrel understood without sanding off the history underneath.

That work has not gone away. What has worn thin is the appetite for it, and the kind of newsroom that once paid for it.

It is easy, and flattering, to call this a loss of nerve – a crop of editors who misplaced their spine. It is a charge editors are strangely willing to accept, since a man who has been cowardly may still be brave tomorrow, whereas a man who is merely redundant has nothing to look forward to. But the charge assumes the editors still steer. They do not, or not much. The press did........

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