'Pitch Perfect': How Modi Govt Is Changing The Game of Cricket Diplomacy

Cricket diplomacy is not new to India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the fourth test match between India and Australia along with Australian PM Anthony Albanese in Ahmedabad on Thursday and both the leaders stood with their respective teams on the ground during the national anthems.

But what Prime Minister Modi has tried is moving cricket diplomacy out of the ‘India-Pakistan bracket’ as it was in the past during the UPA times. Modi chose to invite a ‘first-world’ friendly country with which India’s relationship is growing stronger by the day and nothing signifies it better than cricket, a government source told News18.

The Australian PM has shown far more effort to gel with the Indian ethos and culture, the source pointed out, like Albanese’s gesture to play Holi while he was in Ahmedabad and this showed India’s rising ‘soft power’.

Before this, Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister had undertaken such ‘cricket diplomacy’ too, but with the President as well as the Prime Minister of Pakistan who had toured India for matches between the teams of the two countries.

In 2005, the then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited India and saw a one-day international match along with Manmohan Singh between both sides in Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla stadium (since renamed Arun Jaitley stadium). Singh had then invited Musharraf for the match and said “nothing brings the people of the subcontinent together more than our love for cricket and Bollywood”.

Then in 2011, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani arrived in India to watch the World Cup ODI semi-final clash between the neighbours at the PCA stadium in Mohali. Both the leaders had similarly met the teams as the Indian and Australian PMs did on Thursday and later watched the match together.

While this was done in an effort towards better relations and increased people-to-people contact, ties between India and Pakistan have remained strained. The 2011 visit of Gilani for the India-Pakistan match in fact took place after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the masterminds of which are still free in Pakistan.

The Congress has meanwhile criticised Modi’s presence at the cricket match, with Jairam Ramesh terming it “height of self-obsession”. BJP leaders have, however, countered it, with BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya calling it “cricket diplomacy. It works”.

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