Subcontinental rift: The history of Indo-Pakistani relations

In November 1960, Pakistan arrived in Baroda, Gujarat, to play the local team, preparatory to a long-awaited five-Test series against India. Much of the attention swirled around their 25-year-old batter Hanif Mohammad, star of the countries’ previous two encounters. As his car approached the team’s accommodation, he saw a huge crowd, concentrating in a group of men clearly anxious to extend personal greeting.

“One of them was very insistent,” recalled Hanif. “I opened the window of the car, and shook hands with him and the others.” As he pulled his hand back, however, he noted with horror that it was covered in blood. Some sources blame a sharp ring; Hanif himself thought it the work of a razor blade, and was “sure it was deliberate”. The episode caused shockwaves – doctors had to stave off infection with a course of injections, while Hanif’s mother rushed from Pakistan to be by his side. In the event, he was fit enough to compile 160 in the first Test at Bombay’s Brabourne Stadium two weeks later.

Sixty-five years on, relations between India and Pakistan, always intense, often fraught, plunged for the opposite reason – a handshake withheld, by India’s captain Suryakumar Yadav from Pakistan’s captain Salman Agha, at the T20 Asia Cup in Dubai. Several months later, tension culminates in Pakistan’s threat to pull out of their T20 World Cup fixture against India in Colombo, briefly causing panic about global cricket’s finances. The previous April, after a bloody attack on Indian tourists by terrorists styling themselves the Resistance Front in the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam in disputed Kashmir, the countries had trembled on the brink of war. For five days, the armed forces had grappled along their border, in the air and on the ground, India’s Operation Sindoor versus Pakistan’s Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos, with competing claims of casualties, before an uneasy ceasefire.

The Asia Cup became an outlet for pent-up fury. The antagonists met thrice. Not only were there no handshakes, but the cricketers played up to the recent conflict with their gestures. Haris Rauf put up six fingers and mimed a plane crashing, in reference to Pakistan’s boast of shooting down six Indian aircraft; Jasprit Bumrah clapped back after bowling Haris. Then, when India won the final, Yadav refused to accept the trophy from the Asian Cricket Council’s chairman Mohsin Naqvi, who trebles as Pakistan Cricket Board chairman and Pakistan’s home minister. At last, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi rubbed it in on social media: “Operation Sindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins.”

It made for a new twist in the rivalry of the nuclear-fanged neighbours, who are not only international cricket’s closest kin – Pakistan having been birthed from India by Partition – but its bitterest foes, opposed in three outright wars and numerous nearly wars. At its best, the symbolism of India v Pakistan on the cricket field is inspiring. “Cricket, more than any sport, can help build bridges of peace and harmony,” wrote Shaharyar Khan, the patrician foreign minister who managed multiple Pakistan teams and chaired the PCB. Yet there is also a sense, as Rahul Bhattacharya wrote in his celebrated account of India’s visit to Pakistan in 2003/04, Pundits from Pakistan, that the contest “always ends in tears”.

Traditionally, of course, nations have shown political and diplomatic disfavour by restricting sporting contact – as have India and Pakistan, out of bilateral competition since a handful of limited-overs matches in 2012/13, their relations poisoned by Hindu chauvinism on the one hand, and Muslim extremism on the other. Yet such is their gravitational attraction and box-office clout, the countries have been calculatedly grouped together in every ICC competition since 2013. In Dubai, it seemed, India were itching to play, all the better to assert their regional hegemony, while Pakistan were otherwise too isolated in the cricket world to say no.

Soul-searching ensued. In The Times, Mike Atherton wondered whether the ICC’s fixture contrivances were justified in a “serious sport”, when games were becoming “a proxy for broader tensions and for propaganda”. Modi, whose ethnonationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rejoice in baiting Pakistan, also drew criticism from across the political divide, from Congress leaders Atul Londhe Patil (“If we played, we should have played with sportsman spirit”) and Harshwardhan Sapkal (“There is a certain dignity of a country which he doesn’t maintain”). Mind you, for such a protracted and ill-tempered dispute, the 2025 Asia Cup also faded quickly – this is a tiger cricket has grown used to riding. This is a tiger cricket has grown used to riding.

The disputes, after all, are ancient, dating in some respects back to the great Bombay Quadrangulars and Pentangulars during India’s era of communal cricket – Muslims’ one-wicket victory over Hindus in the 1944 Pentangular was harnessed by Jinnah’s Muslim League in their pursuit of an Islamic republic. Partition then coincided with India’s first tour of Australia, preventing the great Fazal Mahmood (born in Lahore) from joining the team – he almost fell into the hands of a mob on a train from Poona to Bombay, only to be defended by a bat-wielding CK Nayudu, India’s first Test captain. Pakistan’s first champion bowler was luckier than many: more than a million perished and 15 million were displaced, including Hanif and his brothers, who settled in Karachi after fleeing sectarian violence in Saurashtra.

Partition’s seeping wound remains Kashmir, most of which acceded to India, despite a majority Muslim population. Allegiances remain volatile. “Pakistan Zindabad!” was the crowd’s incongruous cry when India hosted West Indies at Srinagar for a one-day international in October 1983. “As the Indian players came into the arena to loosen up… they were booed by some sections of the crowd,” fumed Sunil Gavaskar. “This was unbelievable. Here we were in India, and being booed before even a ball had been bowled.” Kashmiri youths took advantage of a dust storm to vandalise the pitch, and the game was awarded to the visitors on run-rate. There has been only one ODI there since.

All things considered, it’s remarkable how much India and Pakistan have been able to play and, often as not, with great cordiality and even chivalry. The captains when Pakistan first toured India, Abdul Kardar and Lala Amarnath, both hailed from Lahore. The visitors’ first stop was Amritsar, heavily impacted by Partition; they paid pilgrimages to Gandhi’s samadhi and the tomb of the Sufi scholar Nizamuddin Auliya, bearing a “message of peace, commerce and honest friendship”. Many fans followed them, some by boat from Karachi. When Kardar’s men achieved Pakistan’s first Test victory, in Lucknow, they were wildly supported by local students; when they were heckled by Hindu nationalists in Nagpur and Calcutta, a majority of Indians were scornful. Pakistan reciprocally relaxed visa restrictions when India first toured in January 1955, so that more than 10,000 Indians were made welcome in Lahore. Four Tests were diplomatically drawn on tightly strung jute mats.

The great challenge for Indo–Pakistani cricket has been what Harold Macmillan called the great challenge of statesmanship: “Events, dear boy, events.” A military coup in Pakistan installed General Ayub Khan as president, tilting the country towards the US; India, meanwhile, began fashioning a role among the loosely grouped non-aligned nations. The cricket grew almost unbearably grim, with umpiring and crowd behaviour issues of contention. As India’s Nari Contractor was walking off after being bowled by Fazal at Bombay in 1960/61, the umpire called a delayed no-ball. “The chewing gum got stuck in my throat,” he explained. At Delhi, Pakistani batters complained of mirrors being flashed in their eyes. All five Tests were drawn, fewer than half the days having featured more than 200 runs.

A veneer of diplomacy remained. The foreign ministers met in Delhi during the series, and the information ministers in Rawalpindi, where they called on the press to foster “a positive psychological atmosphere among the peoples of the two countries”. But, as Peter Oborne put it in his magisterial history of cricket in Pakistan, Wounded Tiger: “It was becoming evident that Tests between Pakistan and India had developed a unique sensibility. Those who were normal became slightly mad. Those who were already troubled were temporarily blinded with a kind of insanity. These Test matches were burdened with a weight of history, meaning and consequence which they could not sustain, and beneath the burden of which they buckled.” Realpolitik finally prevailed in 1965, when Ayub launched an attack on Indian positions in Kashmir, turning Siachen Glacier into the world’s chilliest disputed territory. When India came to the aid of Bengali secessionists in East Pakistan in 1971, reconciliation seemed impossible.

For 17 years either side of the Bangladesh War of Independence, the cricket of India and Pakistan existed in parallel, even if their cricketers from time to time intersected, in county and festival matches. As their armies fought, Gavaskar, Bishan Bedi and Farokh Engineer from India had socialised and roomed together with Pakistan’s Zaheer Abbas, Asif Masood and Intikhab Alam on a Rest of the World tour of Australia. “The World XI players used the situation to imagine some really funny situations,” recalled Gavaskar, “such as Intikhab and Farokh facing each other with bayonets; myself in a fighter plane, with Asif Masood on my tail; and Bishan and Zaheer trying to run away. We had a good laugh. I must say there was no tension at all between the Indians and Pakistani players, despite what was happening.” India’s captain Ajit Wadekar later accepted Kardar’s invitation to take part in a series of matches celebrating Pakistan’s 25th anniversary.

Resumption of ties was made possible in 1978 after the defeat of Indira Gandhi in India and the succession of a sport-fancying strongman in Pakistan – General Zia-ul-Haq, who burnished his mix of political Islam and anti-communism with a sheen of “cricket for peace”, and marked the arrival of Bedi’s Indians in Karachi with a national holiday. Some of the fear of failure had worn away. The teams proved well matched, and capable of exciting cricket. Pakistan prevailed 2-0, India by the same score when they hosted Pakistan a year later. They would stage 20 more evenly contested Tests during the 1980s, and meet in 30 one-day internationals, largely in the crucible of the UAE’s Sharjah Cricket Stadium, with India achieving occasional success but Pakistan maintaining an edge.

For a decade, relations were disarmingly cordial. The cricket was red-blooded, the crowds could be unruly, the umpiring was seldom uncontroversial, and events could intrude brutally – news of Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 resulted in the abandonment of a one-day international. But the ties held, and the feats of stars such as Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Ravi Shastri and Kapil Dev assumed an outsized significance. Shastri became a hero for guiding India home against Pakistan in the final of the World Championship of Cricket in March 1985. Miandad achieved divinity for his last-ball six to lift Pakistan to the Australasia Cup at Sharjah in March 1986. No fewer than 36 songs were composed in his honour.

Most importantly, after India’s unexpected victory at the 1983 World Cup, India and Pakistan united with Sri Lanka to form the Asian Cricket Council and its alter ego, PILCOM – a commercial alliance to wrest the World Cup for South Asia. The first global tournament outside England, under the striking leadership of Jagmohan Dalmiya of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, portended a shift in cricket’s centre of economic and political gravity. Pakistan’s successful advocacy of third-country umpires, trialled when Imran as captain had Indian umpires VK Ramaswamy and Piloo Reporter stand in a Lahore Test against West Indies in November 1986, likewise showed their administration to advantage.

Then, events. Zia was assassinated in August 1988, and the end of the Cold War left Pakistan unmoored, even as India’s ramshackle economy was about to benefit from a spurt of liberalisation. It may be from this point that the countries, and their cricket, were destined to diverge. Relations again plunged over Kashmir, India’s intelligence agencies rigging an election to thwart secessionists, Pakistan’s generals sponsoring a retaliatory insurgency, and religious extremism in each country stoking a response. The Babri mosque in Ayodhya became a flashpoint, the BJP and their paramilitary wing, the RSS, fomenting a campaign to restore an allegedly pre-existing Hindu temple. In his panoramic history of Indian cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field, Ramachandra Guha even wondered whether Pakistan’s long-term cricket edge over India influenced the early stirrings of Hindu zealotry. He recalled the atmosphere at the Delhi School of Economics after Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup victory: “The students thought that Pakistan’s victory was a consequence of their being an Islamic state. A basis in one religion gives a nation strength to win and compete, they argued. The young economists believed the Ayodhya movement, if successful, would result in a strong state run for and by Hindus, this in turn leading to satisfactory results on the cricket field.”

Two thousand were killed later that year in the riots that demolished the mosque; 257 when jihadists detonated a dozen bombs in Bombay in March 1993. Behind the scenes, both countries were scrambling to develop a nuclear arsenal, which they would unveil within months of each other. There would be only three Tests between India and Pakistan during the 1990s; of the 45 one-day internationals, 38 were staged offshore. Games became, if anything, still more polarising. The Hindu populist Bal Thackeray, whose Shiv Sena party dominated politics in Bombay, outlined a kind of Asian Tebbit Test: “It is the duty of Muslims to prove they are not Pakistanis. I want them with tears in their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan.”

For another decade or so, however, cricket proved strikingly resilient. PILCOM managed the 1996 World Cup lucratively. When political unrest jeopardised games in Sri Lanka, the organisers demonstrated the safety of Colombo by staging an exhibition game featuring a Wills XI of five Indians, including captain Mohammad Azharuddin, and six Pakistanis: Sachin Tendulkar opened the batting with Saeed Anwar, while pacemen Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were backed up by spinners Anil Kumble and Aashish Kapoor. As Tendulkar took a catch off Wasim, noted Mike Marqusee in War Minus The Shooting, “it was hard to believe that not 24 hours before, Indian and Pakistani troops were exchanging fire across the disputed Kashmir border”.

By the next World Cup, in England, everyday crossfire on the Line of Control had exploded into the Kargil War. Yet on a day nine soldiers were killed in Kashmir, Wasim and Azharuddin shook hands, and led their teams in a game of cricket. “That handshake was a testament to the fact that even amid conflict, civility could prevail in the sporting arena, and that human connection, however fragile, could find a moment to exist,” said the Congress politician and diplomat Shashi Tharoor. “It recalled the Christmas truces of World War One, when British and German soldiers would emerge from the trenches where they had been shelling each other to death, and play a friendly game of football
to honour the Messiah of Peace.”

The Kargil War, in fact, only briefly marred the further thaw in relations which first permitted Pakistan to visit India, in the face of staunch resistance from Shiv Sena, for a memorable Test series in which Wasim’s men won a squeaker in Chennai, and Azharuddin’s triumphed in Delhi thanks to Kumble’s 10-74. An Asian Test Championship was thrown together, which concluded in high drama at Eden Gardens when the ground had to be cleared after an unpopular run-out decision against Tendulkar.

Sanctioned at first by India’s prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the purported “dove among hawks” in the ranks of the BJP, there was a further flurry of bilateral Test competition – a dozen games between March 2004 and December 2007. The PCB again aligned with the BCCI to secure the World Cup for Asia. The insurgent Indian Cricket League and the inaugural Indian Premier League both showcased Pakistani players. “Partisanship has lost its chauvinistic flavour,” opined Tharoor optimistically in Shadow Across The Playing Fields.

Yet by the time that book, co-written with Shaharyar Khan, had been published, partisanship was about to start an irresistible comeback. Fifteen years after their first incursion, jihadists returned to Mumbai: this time, 175 were killed and 300 injured.A planned Indian tour of Pakistan was immediately abandoned. “You can’t have one team coming from Pakistan to kill people in our country,” said sports minister MS Gill, “and another team going from India to play cricket there.”

When Sri Lanka filled that breach, jihadists in Lahore attacked their team bus. Imran Khan, now involved in Pakistani politics, had confidently stated that no terrorist group would ever risk a security incident involving cricketers, for fear of the backlash. This frontlash would not only knock Pakistan out of its role as a co-host of the next World Cup, but prevent inbound tours for a decade. Pakistani players in the IPL have become a distant memory.

Hope has since flickered. As India beat Pakistan in Mohali on the way to winning that 2011 World Cup, Vajpayee’s successor, Manmohan Singh, was hosting his counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and insisting that the countries “shared the same destiny”. Defeated captain Shahid Afridi was the personification of grace: “First of all, I’d like to congratulate the Indian cricket team and the Indian nation for this great victory, and wish them all the best for the final.” But the most combative Indian, who loudly dedicated victory to the victims of the Mumbai attacks, was their coach in last year’s Asia Cup, Gautam Gambhir, who had come to the job via a political career in the BJP. Since the election of May 2014, of course, the BJP have so thoroughly colonised the BCCI that, as Sushant Singh, lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale, observed in a contribution to Cricket Et Al: “The Indian cricket team no longer represents India; it functions as the BJP’s sporting arm.”

Yet Pakistani terrorists, known to number in the tens of thousands with the condonation of the country’s military and the support of its madrasas, have provided Indians with ample cause for distrust. In January 2016, shortly after meeting Imran in Delhi, Modi paid an opportunistic visit to Lahore, seeming to prelude a modest improvement in relations. Days later, jihadists from Kashmir attacked an air base in Pathankot, in Punjab: seven Indian soldiers and a civilian were killed. India’s meeting with Pakistan in the T20 World Cup, scheduled for Dharamsala, was rejected by the government of Himachal Pradesh, and relocated to less volatile Kolkata.

Three years later, jihadists attacked a security convoy at Pulwama on Kashmir’s Jammu–Srinagar highway, killing 40. This time, the BCCI, then under a temporary administration, called on the ICC to “sever ties with countries from which terrorism emanates”. It was the PCB’s turn to complain to the ICC when the Indian team led by MS Dhoni, a colonel in the Territorial Army, adopted fatigue caps in the field for an ODI against Australia in Ranchi. When Pakistan upset India by ten wickets at the T20 World Cup in November 2021, there were reports of Muslims in India being arrested and detained for expressing excitement on WhatsApp and social media. Gambhir approved when a group of medical students in Kashmir and Agra were charged under anti-terror and sedition laws for openly supporting Pakistan. “Those bursting crackers on Pak winning can’t be Indian!” he declaimed on Twitter. “We stand by our boys.”

Over the decades, Indo–Pakistani cricket has been known for surprises – remarkable capacity to heal, startling outbreaks of amity. The scope for that is now acutely circumscribed. Gavaskar, who once embraced Pakistani cricketers, has soured; Imran himself, after an abortive prime ministership, has languished in jail. In August 2019, India’s home minister, Amit Shah, announced the revocation of Kashmir’s quasi-autonomous status, flooding the region with troops; two months later, his son Jay became secretary of the BCCI. Today, of course, Jay runs the show at the ICC, reflecting India’s financial predominance, and that cricket and politics are asphyxiatingly entwined. Perhaps it is surprising that handshakes lasted as long as they did – depending heavily, as the story of Hanif Mohammad reminds us, on the spirit in which they’re offered.

Gideon Haigh is a journalist. His latest book is Who Is Wallace? The Enigma of the World’s Oldest Prisoner.

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