🔗 Share this article

It's only in recent years that women in the subcontinent have gained recognition as serious cricketers. Over many years, they faced ridicule, disapproval, exclusion – even the threat of violence – to pursue their love for the game. Currently, India is staging a global tournament with a prize fund of $13.8 million, where the host country's athletes could emerge as beloved icons if they achieve their first tournament victory.

It would, therefore, be a great injustice if the upcoming discussion centered around their male counterparts. And yet, when India confront Pakistan on Sunday, parallels are inevitable. Not because the host team are highly favoured to win, but because they are not expected to exchange greetings with their opposition. Handshakegate, if we must call it that, will have a another chapter.

If you missed the original drama, it occurred at the conclusion of the men's group match between India and Pakistan at the continental championship last month when the India captain, Suryakumar Yadav, and his team disappeared the pitch to evade the customary friendly post-match ritual. Two similar follow-ups transpired in the Super4 match and the championship game, climaxing in a protracted presentation ceremony where the new champions refused to accept the trophy from the Pakistan Cricket Board's chair, Mohsin Naqvi. It would have been comic if it hadn't been so tragic.

Observers of the female cricket World Cup might well have anticipated, and even pictured, a different approach on Sunday. Female athletics is intended to offer a new blueprint for the industry and an different path to negative traditions. The sight of Harmanpreet Kaur's team members extending the hand of camaraderie to Fatima Sana and her team would have made a powerful statement in an ever more polarized world.

Such an act could have recognized the mutually adverse environment they have overcome and provided a symbolic reminder that political issues are temporary compared with the bond of female solidarity. Undoubtedly, it would have deserved a place alongside the additional positive narrative at this competition: the exiled Afghanistan cricketers welcomed as guests, being brought back into the sport four years after the Taliban drove them from their homes.

Instead, we've encountered the firm boundaries of the sporting sisterhood. This comes as no surprise. India's men's players are huge stars in their country, idolized like gods, regarded like royalty. They possess all the benefits and influence that comes with fame and wealth. If Yadav and his side can't balk the directives of an authoritarian prime minister, what hope do the female players have, whose elevated status is only recently attained?

Perhaps it's more astonishing that we're continuing to discuss about a handshake. The Asia Cup furore prompted much deconstruction of that specific sporting tradition, not least because it is viewed as the ultimate marker of fair play. But Yadav's refusal was much less important than what he stated immediately after the first game.

The India captain deemed the winners' podium the "ideal moment" to devote his team's victory to the armed forces who had participated in India's attacks on Pakistan in May, referred to as Operation Sindoor. "I hope they will inspire us all," Yadav informed the post-match interviewer, "so we can provide them more reasons in the field whenever we have the chance to bring them joy."

This reflects the current reality: a live interview by a sporting leader openly celebrating a armed attack in which dozens died. Previously, Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja couldn't get a single humanitarian message past the ICC, including the dove logo – a direct sign of peace – on his bat. Yadav was subsequently fined 30% of his match fee for the comments. He wasn't the sole individual disciplined. Pakistan's Haris Rauf, who mimicked plane crashes and made "six-zero" signals to the audience in the Super4 match – similarly alluding to the hostilities – was given the identical penalty.

This isn't a matter of not respecting your opponents – this is sport appropriated as patriotic messaging. There's no use to be ethically angered by a absent greeting when that's merely a minor plot development in the narrative of two nations actively using cricket as a political lever and instrument of indirect conflict. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made that explicit with his post-final tweet ("Operation Sindoor on the cricket pitch. The result remains unchanged – India wins!"). Naqvi, on his side, proclaims that sport and politics shouldn't mix, while double-stacking positions as a state official and chair of the PCB, and publicly tagging the Indian leader about his country's "embarrassing losses" on the battlefield.

The lesson from this episode shouldn't be about cricket, or the Indian side, or the Pakistani team, in isolation. It serves as a caution that the notion of ping pong diplomacy is over, for the time being. The very game that was employed to foster connections between the nations 20 years ago is now being used to heighten hostilities between them by people who know exactly what they're doing, and massive followings who are active supporters.

Division is affecting every realm of society and as the greatest of the global soft powers, athletics is always vulnerable: it's a type of leisure that directly encourages you to choose a team. Many who find India's actions towards Pakistan belligerent will nonetheless support a Ukrainian tennis player's entitlement to decline meeting a Russian competitor on the court.

If you're still kidding yourself that the athletic field is a magical safe space that brings nations together, go back and watch the Ryder Cup recap. The behavior of the Bethpage crowds was the "ideal reflection" of a golf-loving president who openly incites hatred against his adversaries. Not only did we witness the erosion of the typical sporting principles of equity and shared courtesy, but the speed at which this might be accepted and nodded through when sportspeople themselves – like US captain Keegan Bradley – fail to acknowledge and penalize it.

A handshake is supposed to signify that, at the conclusion of every competition, no matter how intense or bad-tempered, the competitors are setting aside their pretend enmity and acknowledging their common humanity. Should the rivalry isn't pretend – if it requires its athletes come out in vocal support of their respective militaries – then why are you bothering with the sporting field at all? It would be equivalent to don the military uniform immediately.