In the days counting down to the much-anticipated 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup, apart from the buzz about the upcoming games, there was another topic that dominated the discourse — Will Bangladesh, a nation that had featured in every single T20 World Cup since the competition’s 2007 inception, play in the 2026 games? Will Pakistan also boycott the games?
On January 24, 2026, a press release from the International Cricket Council’s Dubai headquarters arrived, disguised as a sports-page diplomatic cable. Bangladesh had been removed from the fixtures of the tournament taking place in India and Sri Lanka, and replaced by Scotland. After much back and forth, the Bangladesh Cricket Team was disqualified by the ICC for refusing to send its players to India, citing security concerns, given the tense India-Bangladesh relations. The ICC found those concerns unverifiable. And so, without ceremony, a team of 160 million people was shown the door.
To anyone following South Asian geopolitics over the previous eighteen months, this was not a sports story. It was politics, dressed in whites and carrying a bat. It is not an anomaly either — cricket as a soft power has played a regular role in diplomacy.
To understand how a cricket schedule became a geopolitical flashpoint, we have to start, as with so many things on the subcontinent, with the British Empire. Cricket did not arrive in India as a sport. It arrived as an ideology.
Cricket constituted a “situational diplomatic tool” for Britain’s bid to retain close ties with its former colonies after independence. The game was designed to instil hierarchy, discipline — the social grammar of colonial rule. What the British did not anticipate was that the colonised would take that grammar and use it to write their own sentences.
Cricket diplomacy emerged from these colonial strategies of the British Empire, but the modern iteration of using cricket to manage international conflict crystallised in the post-colonial era, particularly after the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Early tours in the 1950s were intended, or at least advertised, as gestures of healing between two nations born of the same bloody rupture. In 1955, when the Indian team toured Pakistan, the Wagah border crossing was left open, and 10,000 Indian fans travelled to watch the Lahore Test match. Those moments, in which ordinary people crossed a border that would later be electrified with mutual hostility, represent cricket diplomacy at its most genuinely romantic: not strategy, but sentiment. But sentiment has a short shelf life in South Asian geopolitics.
The moment cricket became a conscious instrument of statecraft instead of a shared passion is generally considered to be February 1987, in a stadium in Jaipur, when Pakistan’s then-President General Zia-ul-Haq famously flew to India to watch a match, a move that arguably averted a war.
The context was grim. India had launched Operation Brasstacks, a combined military exercise in the deserts of Rajasthan, described by global security experts as “bigger than any NATO exercise — and the biggest since World War II.” Pakistan quickly responded by mobilising its forces. Troops were massed on both sides of the border, shared by two nuclear giants. Zia, however, boarded a plane, apparently to watch cricket. During the match, Zia apparently quietly told Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb. The cricket ground had become an arms control back-channel.
This set the template. From Pervez Musharraf’s 2005 visit to India, where his trip became more of a summit as both sides urged to seize a historic chance to end their dispute over Kashmir, to Manmohan Singh’s invitation to Pakistan’s Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the 2011 World Cup semi-final at Mohali, the pattern was consistent. When formal diplomatic channels failed, the cricket ground became the only room left where two nuclear-armed neighbours could sit together without it looking like surrender. The pitch was viewed as a “demilitarised zone,” a rare space where India and Pakistan could engage without the immediate threat of escalation. It was a fragile arrangement, but it worked, until it didn’t.
As we move ahead into the world of contemporary cricket, the metrics of measuring power in the world of cricket have changed considerably. Money, revenue, and viewership are now considered to be the defining measures of power in the politics of the sport. India fares well in all of these dimensions.
India dominates cricket’s financial ecosystem, generating $2.38 billion of the sport’s $3.84 billion global revenue, making it a whopping 62 per cent of the total. The Board of Control for Cricket in India stands as the world’s richest cricket board with a net worth of $2.2 billion, driven primarily by the Indian Premier League, valued at $18.5 billion, with broadcasting rights sold for $6.2 billion for the 2023–2027 cycle.
These are not simply economic or sports power; it is a geopolitical weapon. Effectively, Indian eyeballs bankroll the sport’s existence everywhere else. A single T20I against India in South Africa generates more revenue than New Zealand’s entire ICC distribution for a year.
This financial reality is not incidental to cricket diplomacy. It is cricket diplomacy. When you control the money, you control the rules, and when you control the rules, you determine who gets to play the game — and who gets sent home.
The Indian Premier League, or the IPL, which began in 2008 as a flashy domestic T20 league, has quietly become one of India’s most effective foreign policy instruments. It operates as a form of “soft power coercion.” On one hand, the IPL is genuinely beloved. Players from England, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, South Africa, and virtually every cricket-playing nation compete for contracts that far exceed their national board salaries. Top IPL players earn more in eight weeks than most international cricketers earn in an entire year. This creates a structural dependency —foreign boards need their players available for the IPL window, which means they negotiate their entire international calendar around India’s domestic competition. The ICC has accommodated this, carving out a protected IPL window in the global cricket calendar.
On the other hand, IPL contracts can be revoked, and when they are, the message is rarely purely sporting. On January 3, 2026, the BCCI instructed the Kolkata Knight Riders, or KKR, to release Bangladeshi fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman from their IPL squad. No reason was stated for that directive, but it came amid deteriorating relations between India and Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) responded the following day by writing to the ICC that Bangladesh would not travel to India for its T20 World Cup matches, citing security concerns.
The whole Mustafizur affair underscored the tensions between the neighbours, and India invoked its power as the economic giant of cricket to circumvent Bangladesh and emphasise its national interests.
The BCB argued that, given the BCCI’s position, it was unsafe for its players to play in India. This was never really about security in the conventional sense, and all parties understood that. Bangladesh’s withdrawal and the ICC’s cold institutional response were the conclusion of a diplomatic crisis being played out through sporting infrastructure. Bangladesh became the first nation ever to be ejected from a T20 World Cup, setting an example. The message was clear: India is willing to employ its cricket power to advance its national interests.
Another example of how cricket becomes central to diplomacy, especially in South Asia, was the September 2025 Asia Cup. Following the final against Pakistan, the winning champions India refused to shake hands with the Pakistani players, citing respect for the victims of the terror attack in Pahalgam. They also refused to accept the trophy from Pakistani minister Mohsin Naqvi, who also serves as the President of the Asian Cricket Council, as a protest against Pakistan’s involvement in the attack. Many alleged that Naqvi then left the stage holding the trophy, prompting many of the Indian players to post pictures on social media with edited trophies, taking a jibe at Naqvi.
Some argued that this was unsportsmanlike and not in line with the principles of a gentleman’s game, but others saw it as a calibrated statement in defence of the nation. By refusing a trophy from a Pakistani state representative, India was signalling something beyond cricket — the refusal to legitimise Pakistani government representatives even in a sporting context. The cricket ground, once a demilitarised zone, was now an extension of hard-power signalling.
However, it would be a mistake to read India’s cricketing power as exclusively a South Asian phenomenon. The BCCI’s leverage extends to every cricket-playing nation.
In March 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, at the Narendra Modi Stadium. The event was organised as a tribute to 75 years of diplomatic and cricket relations between the two countries. The stadium itself, renamed from the Sardar Patel Stadium, can hold over 130,000 people, making it the largest cricket ground in the world. Hosting a bilateral summit there was not incidental. It was India communicating, through sheer scale, that the terms of engagement had changed.
For England, the financial dependency is equally stark. The England and Wales Cricket Board scheduled five Test matches against India for 2025, knowing Indian series generates higher revenues than the Ashes cricket. The Ashes, which were historically the most storied rivalry in the sport, now plays second fiddle to an India-England series in revenue terms. The former colonial master, in cricket as in so many other domains, now needs the permission, or at least the commercial participation, of its former colony.
More than just political leverage, cricket has also opened up avenues for more positive humanitarian engagements.
The Indian economic cricket muscle has already built in cricket’s margins — stadiums in Afghanistan, IPL contracts that have made cricketers from the Caribbean and New Zealand financially secure for life, broadcast deals that have carried the sport to audiences in the United States and the Gulf who would never have encountered it otherwise. The IPL, for all the political freight it now carries, has also done something remarkable: it has created a genuinely transnational sporting economy in which a Sri Lankan spinner, an Australian batter, and a South African pacer share a dressing room, a salary structure, and a WhatsApp group. That is soft power in its most organic form, not manufactured through press releases, but through the lived experience of competitive interdependence.
The alternative model is visible if India chooses to look for it. China’s infrastructure diplomacy in the West Indies, spending $132 million on cricket facilities compared to the ICC’s own ten-year global development budget of $70 million, was not subtle, but it was effective precisely because it gave something. India, with far deeper cultural ties to cricket’s global community, is better positioned than any other nation to pursue a version of cricket diplomacy that is simultaneously self-interested and genuinely generative: using its institutional weight to expand the sport into new markets, professionalise smaller boards, and create a South Asian cricket ecosystem.
This is not idealism. It is a calculation. A cricket economy in which Bangladesh is healthy, Pakistan is engaged, and Sri Lanka is stable is one in which India has more leverage, more markets, and more political goodwill than one in which those neighbours are resentful and looking toward Beijing.
The gentleman’s game, as the English used to call it, was designed by an empire to manage its subjects. The postcolonial twist, that those subjects would master it so completely that they now run the sport’s entire political economy, is perhaps the most satisfying irony in the long, complicated story of cricket and power. The question facing India today is not whether it has that power. It does, unquestionably. The question is what it intends to do with it. Whether the crack of bat on ball will echo as the sound of dominion, or the sound of something more durable — a region, fractious and complicated and passionate about a single sport, choosing, for once, to play together.
Author: Disha Bharti