India summed up their ever-worsening relations with Pakistan by celebrating their Asia Cup success in the UAE – without the trophy.
Suryakumar Yadav’s side refused to collect their silverware after Sunday’s final in Dubai because it would have meant interacting with Mohsin Naqvi, who is president of the Asian Cricket Council and chair of the Pakistan Cricket Board, as well as his country’s interior minister.
But, in bizarre pantomime scenes, the team pretended to collect an invisible trophy, celebrated wildly with it – and even posed for a photoshoot.
Relations between India and Pakistan have never properly recovered from the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, but they took a turn for the worse in April, when militants murdered 26 civilians in Pahalgam, in the disputed Jammu & Kashmir region on the Indo-Pak border.
Indian PM Narendra Modi blamed the atrocity on Pakistan, who have denied involvement, and the ill feeling played out during the 20-day Asia Cup in the Gulf.
With India’s cricketers under instructions from their board – itself heavily influenced by Modi’s ruling BJP party – not to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts, the tournament took place under a geopolitical cloud and was repeatedly inflamed by provocative gestures from both teams.
The sides met three times during the competition, with India winning all three and Suryakumar dedicating the first of the victories to ‘all our armed forces who showed a lot of bravery’. That cost him 30% of his match fee for breaking ICC rules which forbid players from making political statements.
After the second match, an ill-tempered affair, Pakistan fast bowler Haris Rauf suffered the same penalty after making a ‘6–0’ signal while fielding on the boundary, a reference to the number of planes Pakistan claim to have shot down (compared with none by India) during the four-day military conflict that followed Pahalgam. He also mimicked a plane crashing.
It came as no surprise when India declined to mount the podium to collect their medals from Naqvi, who has since said they must visit him in the ACC office to pick up the trophy.
Instead, the Indians staged their own celebrations, with the secretary of the Indian board, Devajit Saikia, explaining: ‘We have decided not to take the Asia Cup trophy from the ACC chairman, who happens to be one of the main leaders of Pakistan.
‘But that does not mean that the gentleman will take away the trophy with him along with the medals. So it is very unfortunate and we hope that the trophy and the medals will be returned to India as soon as possible.’
India and Pakistan are due to play each other in the women’s World Cup in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Sunday.
