Articles
Hard earned Sports Diplomacy wasted by India and Pakistan
Opinion | Articles | John Dayal | 26-Sep-2025
India and Pakistan, two nations scarred by Partition, five wars including one this year, seem to have yet again used a cricket field in distant Dubai as a surrogate for the battlefield. India won the two matches the cricket teams played, but it was the ugliness in the stands and in the interpersonal aggression that tinges memory rather than moments of cricketing excellence.
Sports need not be war by any other means, although countries have used sports politics in the past to weaken Olympics, as in the case of the US and Nato nations’ buycott of the Moscow Olympics, or to nudge an end of apartheid in South Africa.
But if there is political will, sports can also perhaps help head wounds, be a catalyst for peace, specially between neighbours with similar if not identical sports cultures rooted in the common history of the subcontinent.
Sporting ties between neighbours India and Pakistan have been punctuated by politics. A defining moment came in February 1987, when Pakistan’s military ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq, made an unannounced visit to New Delhi to watch the Test series — a dramatic instance of what came to be called “cricket diplomacy”. The visit, late February 1987, eased a tense moment and remains emblematic of the possibilities of sports-led engagement.
Cricket again intersected with diplomacy in March 2011, when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani accepted an invitation to attend the World Cup semi-final in Mohali on 30 March 2011, a reciprocal gesture during a tournament that India co-hosted. That too was hailed as a useful softening of stances, even if it did not convert into long-term détente.
A decade earlier, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus journey to Lahore on 19 February 1999 was a potent reminder that gestures, not just agreements, can change atmospherics. It can be argued that episodic engagement, if repeated and institutionalised through political will, can accumulate trust.
To treat sport as mere “soft” diplomacy is to underestimate its scale. India–Pakistan cricket is not a bilateral contest; it is a global media event. The India Pakistan match at the 2019 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup drew an estimated 273 million (27.3 crore) unique TV viewers worldwide, with over 50 million digital-only viewers, according to ICC reporting and press coverage of the tournament. In India, the match accounted for some 233 million TV viewers; the tournament’s reach estimated at 545 (54.5 crore) million across Indian TV and digital platforms.
The demand for tickets underlines the phenomenon’s intensity. When the ICC re-opened ticket sales for the 2019 World Cup, for which data is easily available, organisers recorded over 3 million ticket applications for roughly 800,000 available tickets across the tournament — a stark measure of public appetite and, by extension, of the economic leverage sport commands.
If one considers the economic footprint of major tournaments, the numbers are equally persuasive. The ICC reported that the 2023 Men’s Cricket World Cup in India generated an estimated economic impact of US$ 1.39 billion, with tourism across host cities contributing roughly US$ 861.4 million and total spectator attendance estimated at 1.25 million.
That is not small change; it is real income for hotels, transport, hospitality workers and local businesses — a practical reason for co-operation.
Sport is tangible economic capital. When tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of viewers depend on a fixture, leaders and administrators possess could incentives to keep the channels open.
Numbers tell one story; human gestures tell another. In athletics, Neeraj Chopra of India and Arshad Nadeem of Pakistan have offered an exemplary narrative. Champions in the javelin, both hailing from the soil of undivided Punjab, they have displayed mutual respect and friendship on the world stage.
Their embraces, shared smiles, and public congratulations have travelled faster than diplomatic communiqués. When Chopra embraced his Pakistani counterpart, or when Chopra’s mother referred to Arshad as “another son of Haryana”, millions in South Asia saw a different, more humane script of identity.
The Paris 2024 Olympic moment — in which Arshad threw a record 92.97 metres to win gold — and the warm cross-border reactions that followed, are evidence of sport’s moral force.
Cricket and hockey, beloved of the people of both countries, cannot of course resolve territorial disputes or dismantle violent networks. But sport’s unique humane attributes could make it a valuable adjunct to diplomacy.
Mass sports reaches ordinary people. A child in Karachi or Kanpur who watches a match live or on a phone internalises images of shared excellence. Sports share a common language — run rates, strike rates, a javelin’s distance — that humanises the other. A spinoff from the financial gains of the games.
Shared sporting events can thus create overlapping material interests that favour engagement.
If sport is to serve peace, ad hoc gestures must become institutions. Neutral venues such as Dubai served a purpose during crises; they must not become permanent substitutes. Carefully regulated home and away fixtures restore normality.
Women’s cricket and hockey still enjoy fewer political overtones; joint development here can possibly seed long-term social change.
Sport can be politicised. The 2008 Mumbai terror attacks froze cricket contacts for years. Where politicians see short-term gain, sport can be sacrificed. Recent instances on Indian and Pakistani stadia, where matches became sites for heightened nationalist posturing, warn that sports diplomacy must be carefully guarded against abuse.
The data are plain: hundreds of millions watch India–Pakistan fixtures; millions apply for tickets; major tournaments inject billions of dollars into host economies. The human moments are plain too: champions who hug, mothers who adopt rivals as kin, fans who do cheer an opponent’s excellence, if sensibilities are not blunted by poisonous propaganda.
Sport will not settle the terror and the acrimony that besets Kashmir, or disarm extremist networks. But it can change the terms in which citizens imagine each other. If leaders harness economic incentives, institutionalise contacts, and celebrate shared heroes, the playing fields can become training grounds for peace, not proxies for war.
We can try.
(The author is a Sr. Journalists, Right activist, and spokesman of the All India Catholic Union. Views expressed in this article are personal)
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