Cricket, in South Asia, was never merely a sport. It was a shared language, spoken fluently even when diplomacy failed, even when borders hardened and guns replaced dialogue. That language is now being rewritten, not with runs and wickets, but with political pressure, strategic exclusion, and calculated silence.
The recent removal of Bangladesh fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman from the Indian Premier League (IPL) is not an isolated administrative decision. It is a symptom, perhaps the clearest yet, of how India has transformed cricket from soft power into a blunt geopolitical instrument.
The Incident That Exposed the System
On January 3, BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia told India’s ANI that the board had instructed Kolkata to release Bangladesh pacer Mustafizur Rahman due to “recent developments.” Kolkata complied the same day.
That phrase,“recent developments,”is deliberately elastic. It is the kind of bureaucratic fog that allows an institution to do something political while pretending it is procedural. No injury was cited as the reason. No sporting logic was publicly offered. The implication, widely understood in Bangladesh and echoed in Indian commentary, was that the decision was tied to the worsening political climate between Bangladesh and India after the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024 and her subsequent refuge in India.
In other words: the bowler was not dropped from a league; he was dropped from a relationship.
How Cricket Becomes a Punishment Tool
In a normal sporting ecosystem, franchise cricket is transactional. Players move across borders because leagues want skill, and players want careers. That is what a global sport looks like when it is allowed to behave like a sport.
South Asia is increasingly different. Here, cricket is mutating into a diplomatic lever, a tool not only for image-making, but also for discipline and punishment. And the country that can do this most effectively is India, because India is not simply a participant in world cricket. India is the market.
The IPL is the richest franchise tournament on earth. India supplies the largest audience. Money flows in one direction so overwhelmingly that many boards and institutions have learned to speak softly around Delhi, not because Delhi is always right, but because Delhi is always rich.
When a sport becomes dependent on a single treasury, neutrality becomes a luxury. And morality becomes negotiable.
The Real Message: “Access Is Conditional”
If Mustafizur can be bought at auction for an enormous fee and then removed on a politically convenient pretext, what does that tell the region?
It tells every neighbouring country, and every player, that entry into “Indian cricket” is not a sporting matter. It is permission-based. It is conditional. It can be withdrawn, suddenly and publicly, as a signal.
That is why this episode is being read, quite reasonably, as a statement: Indian cricket is not a platform you earn; it is a privilege India grants.
This is not soft power anymore. This is coercive power wrapped in the glamour of sport.
The Domestic Engine Behind the Decision
The ugliness does not stop at institutions. The episode reveals how quickly major cricket decisions can be hijacked by India’s domestic majoritarian ecosystem.
According to the narrative circulating in Bangladesh (and referenced in Indian critiques), hardline Hindu nationalist groups pressured Kolkata not to play Mustafizur and issued threats, including towards the franchise and its owner. The point here is not the theatre of outrage; it is what followed: capitulation.
If administrators and political authorities bend to communal agitation, they do not merely “avoid controversy.” They legitimise intimidation as a method. They teach the region that threats work—and that the boundary line between fan passion and political bullying has dissolved.
A sport that kneels to communal pressure becomes a billboard for communal power.
Security: The Question India Cannot Escape
Bangladesh’s response, banning IPL broadcasts, formally raising concerns with the ICC, and seeking to move World Cup matches out of India, was not just nationalist theatre. It was rooted in a simple, devastating question:
If India cannot ensure the security and dignity of one Bangladeshi cricketer in the IPL, what guarantee exists for an entire team, management, journalists, and travelling supporters during a World Cup?
Bangladesh’s position, as stated in your text, is that ICC’s security assessment acknowledged specific risks. Whether the ICC ultimately shifts venues or not, the damage is already done: India’s credibility as a “safe, neutral host” has been dragged into the political mud—largely by India’s own domestic climate and the BCCI’s own choices.
The Pattern Is Familiar: Pakistan Was the Prototype
For years, India’s relationship with Pakistan has shown what happens when cricket is treated as a geopolitical theatre. Tournaments get “hybrid models.” Venues become battlegrounds. Symbolic gestures, handshakes, photo-ops, trophy presentations, become diplomatic statements.
Your text cites an Asia Cup example where India’s objections drove venue arrangements and where symbolic refusals intensified controversy. The details of any specific incident can be debated, but the pattern is unmistakable: India increasingly behaves as though tournaments are not mutually governed events but negotiated spaces where Indian preference becomes de facto policy.
The problem is not that India has interests. Every country does. The problem is that India’s interests, backed by unmatched financial weight, frequently become everyone else’s reality.
What Was Lost: Cricket as a Bridge
South Asia once had a different idea of cricket—a rare shared language that could survive when everything else broke down. The 2004 India tour of Pakistan is often remembered as the high watermark: “friendship series,” leaders speaking of winning hearts, fans travelling under special arrangements. Even after Mumbai 2008, cricket diplomacy returned in flashes, like the 2011 World Cup semifinal attended by both prime ministers.
Those moments mattered because they suggested something larger: that sport could force adversaries to sit, to look, to breathe the same air.
The Mustafizur episode moves in the opposite direction. It says: we can keep you out, and we can do it with a smile, and the world will accept it because our money runs the sport.
That is a terrifying precedent.
India’s Cricket Empire and the ICC Problem
The uncomfortable truth is that the ICC, structurally, is not built to resist India. When one board dominates revenue, the regulator becomes psychologically captured, less a referee than a manager of the dominant player’s satisfaction.
Your text also points to the wider perception of institutional proximity between Indian political power and cricket governance. Even if one avoids personalising the argument, the broader issue stands: when a sport’s global governance is shaped by one country’s money and political climate, it ceases to look global. It begins to look imperial.
And empires rarely tolerate equal neighbours.
Bangladesh’s Defiance and Its Own Test
Bangladesh’s assertive response carries symbolic force. A smaller nation has said: honour first. That matters in a region where small states often learn to swallow insults for access.
But Bangladesh also faces its own test: defiance must become a strategy, not just rhetoric. A bold stance can win a moment; diplomacy must win the decade. If the region is moving toward a future where sport and politics collide openly, Bangladesh will need more than anger, it will need a clear plan: security protocols, negotiation leverage, regional alliances, and economic resilience.
Because India’s greatest advantage is not just nationalism. It is dependent on other dependencies on Indian cricket money, Indian markets, and Indian approvals.
The Verdict: This Is Not Cricket, It’s Control
So, is it still cricket?
Not in the moral sense. Not when a player becomes collateral. Not when “recent developments” becomes a euphemism for political filtration. Not when communal intimidation sets a selection policy. Not when the world’s most powerful board behaves like a state ministry, with franchises and players as its paperwork.
India has every right to be influential. It does not have the right to turn influence into punishment, to treat access like a leash, and to call it normal governance.
Cricket, at its best, is competition with restraint, power disciplined by rules, rivalry contained by ethics. When India weaponises cricket’s economy and domestic political climate to police neighbours, it doesn’t just damage Bangladesh. It damages the game’s meaning.
And once a game becomes a visa regime, once it becomes conditional entry, conditional dignity, conditional belonging, then the scoreboard is no longer the point.
The point becomes domination.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
