BCCI a sporting adjunct of India’s ruling BJP: Wisden stirs a hornet’s nest

The past year – be it the handshake row during the Asia Cup to the rigmarole before the T20 World Cup in the wake of the ouster of Mustafizur Rehman from IPL – had seen politicisation of cricket reaching an alarming level. Lawrence Booth, editor of cricket’s holy grail Wisden, stirred the hornet’s nest in its 2026 edition by calling it out and coming down on brazen efforts to weaponise the sport and their players.

In his Editor’s Note, Booth said the BCCI were the ‘sporting adjunct of India’s ruling BJP’ and drew on the experience of the last Asia Cup in the UAE to prove his point. ‘’It was obvious long before this latest grandstanding that the BCCI were the sporting adjunct of India’s ruling BJP,’’ he wrote. ‘’But the relationship became explicit when India captain Suryakumar Yadav dedicated the first of his side’s three Asia Cup wins over Pakistan to the armed forces. A few months earlier, terrorists had killed 26 in Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to a brief military conflict, complete with codenamed assaults.’’

‘’And the idea that cricket was now a legitimate proxy for more lethal activity was hammered home on X by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, after his country beat Pakistan in the final: Operation Sindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins!’

‘’The real-world Operation Sindoor had left dozens dead, on both sides of the border. Now it was being equated with a game of T20. Suryakumar lapped it up, suggesting: it feels good when the country’s leader himself bats on the frontfoot – it felt like he took the strike and scored runs.'”

 Taking a pot shot at Indian players’ refusal to shake hands with their Pakistan counterparts, Booth wrote: ‘’If India were so appalled by Pakistan, they should simply have refused to play them. Instead, they opted for humiliation. But it was all performative: before the public snub, the captains had shaken hands in private. And when the two nations’ Under-21 hockey teams met soon after in Malaysia, the game ended with hugs and high-fives.

‘’Cricket has become an important piece on the BJP’s geopolitical chessboard, and the Asia Cup descended into tit-for-tat farce, with players on both sides making tasteless gestures about fighter planes and India refusing to take the stage to receive the trophy from Mohsin Naqvi. At the time of writing, the trophy is thought to be under lock and key in the UAE, a neat symbol of international cricket’s dysfunction.’’

The sport’s governance, in Booth’s words, had become more ‘’Orwellian’’ with Naqvi, who wears multiple hats being the Interior Minister of Pakistan, chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) and chairman of Asian Cricket Council (ACC) resorting to major brinkmanship to put the ICC T20 World Cup in jeopardy. ‘’Was there a clearer indictment of the game’s governance in 2025 than Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Mohsin Naqvi’s assertion that politics and sport can’t go together? Presumably he had forgotten he was also his country’s interior minister,’’ he observed.