How Indian Boycott Could Backfire In Semis Of World Cup

It is not looking good for the always much-anticipated World Cup match between India and Pakistan, scheduled to take place at Old Trafford on June 16.

That meeting, between Asia’s two longest established cricket teams, is in jeopardy following a recent terror attack in disputed Kashmir which killed 40 Indian soldiers. Since then, there have been tit-for-tat air raids in the area as both the retaliation and rhetoric escalate, the latter all the way to that match in Manchester.

So far, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), no doubt with the backing if not the behest of Narendra Modi’s government, has lobbied the International Cricket Council and it’s members to boycott Pakistan. The terse request has been for the others to “sever ties with countries from which terrorism emanates”.

With Pakistan’s recently elected Prime Minister, Imran Khan, one of the great all-round cricketers in history, the game has even more political heft than before. Yet boasting two cricket-mad populations in the hundreds of millions, this is not the first time politics between India and Pakistan, or indeed terrorism, has impacted on the game in those two countries.

Due to the constant clashes in Kashmir, a beautiful, mountainous tract of land whose precise borders have been fought over since Partition in 1947, India has not toured Pakistan for Test matches since January 2006, while Pakistan last played a Test in India on December 8, 2007.

The main driver of this stand-off has been the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, in which a group called Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 164 people. They’d come by sea having used Pakistan as a base, an atrocity that still cuts deeply some 11 years later.