Walk through an airport lounge or a village market in India, and you’ll probably see countless people tracking a cricket match on their smartphones. Ditto in electronics showrooms across the country, where television screens distract throngs of customers.
Cricket is inescapable on the subcontinent for much of the year. Play runs roughly between September and May, and international, domestic and Indian Premier League games leave little room for an offseason. That might sound familiar to Americans, but cricket isn’t simply another sport in South Asia. It is one of the few institutions that transcends borders in a region divided by history, religion and politics.
That is, until the game became warped by politics. The editor of “Wisden,” an almanac known among readers as the “Bible of cricket,” described the Board of Control for Cricket in India this year as “the sporting adjunct” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. The sport’s international governance bears the BJP’s stamp too: Modi’s second-in-command, Home Minister Amit Shah, is the father of the International Cricket Council’s chairman, Jay Shah. Whether the latter’s ascent was meritorious or not, the appointment doesn’t sit right with millions of fans.
That discontent isn’t without reason. “The most physical expression of the amalgamation of Indian cricket and contemporary politics,” wrote journalist Sharda Ugra, was the construction of what in 2021 came to be known as the Narendra Modi Stadium. It was unusual for a prime minister to be so honored while in office, and the venue seemed to be used to score partisan points. The arena was home to a rally with President Donald Trump in 2020. Three years later, writer Pradeep Magazine noted that the decision to stage an India-Pakistan World Cup match there — in Modi’s home state — was evidently a way to get Muslim players to compete in the heart of the “BJP’s Hindutva laboratory.” The tournament struck one columnist as an “extended election campaign.”
The shenanigans have become more pointed since. The Indian national team refused to shake hands with its Pakistani opponents after defeating them in the 2025 Asia Cup. The reason: A few months earlier, India alleged that Pakistani terrorists killed 26 civilians in Pahalgam, a town in Kashmir, prompting the two countries to trade military strikes. The team captain dedicated the cricket victory to the Indian armed forces. Modi likened the team’s win to the battlefield: “#OperationSindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins!,” he wrote online. Gratuitous — and unsporting.
A nastier example came in January, when Bollywood actor and cricket franchise owner Shah Rukh Khan recruited a Bangladeshi player for his Indian Premier League team. As the Times of India chronicled, the reaction was swift and merciless. One Hindu spiritual leader demanded that Khan rescind the hire and divert the player’s money to the families of Hindus killed in Bangladesh. Sangeet Som, a prominent BJP figure, described Khan as a traitor who had invested in a country “working against India.”
It didn’t matter that the league brings together players from across the world. The campaign had its desired effect, as the Board of Control for Cricket in India instructed the franchise to drop the player. In response, Bangladesh temporarily banned broadcasts of the Indian Premier League within its borders — and, later, boycotted playing the World Cup in India. For at least one week in February, Pakistan advised its national team to boycott its own match against India to “support” Bangladesh.
Such dustups recur as India bullies its way around the cricket world. That’s been years in the making.
The Indian Premier League transformed the country into the global financial engine of the sport, generating more revenue than any other cricket circuit and attracting the best players, broadcasters and sponsors. As money accumulated, influence followed. Decisions over tournament schedules, hosting rights and even the contours of international competition came to orbit around India. The country thus controls the game’s economics — and its character.
With great power comes great responsibility, and for generations, cricket’s stewards understood that mandate. The sport accomplished in South Asia what diplomacy couldn’t, giving rivals a reason to occupy the same civic space. An India-Pakistan series was never simply about runs and wickets; it was a rare moment when two nuclear-armed nations competed against each other peacefully.
Now that space, if it’s shared at all, is governed by the same calculations that divide the region. Modi may think that’s somehow a political boon, but it isn’t. Degrading such a sacred project makes cricket, and the world, worse off.
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