India’s cricket reflects the growth and politics of the country more than ever
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We are 10 miles from the border when the guide turns on the music. “We can pick up Pakistan radio now,” he says.
Lahore City FM is playing Tiny Dancer by Elton John. Three cricket nations – India, Pakistan and England – represented in that one moment and all heading in different directions.
Not long after we pulled into the car park in Attari, the border closure ceremony begins, which completes the pair having seen it before from the Pakistan side. Tourists from all over India and a sprinkling of westerners are whipped up by a prancing ringleader in a Border Security Force uniform who could be a DJ at an Indian Premier League game. On the India side the stadium is huge, dwarfing the one in Pakistan, the music is louder, too, from India. The one-upmanship between neighbours boiled down to this.
The show, for that is what it is, starts with teenagers running towards the Pakistan border gate waving the India tricolour, cheered on by spectators, some wearing the replica India cricket tops sold on every street corner at grounds around the country. The goose-stepping soldiers from both sides preen, twiddle their moustaches, puff their chests out and goad each other with their elaborate high kicks while the crowds cheer. It ends around sunset with the flags lowered and border gates slammed shut. “People love each other, eat the same food, we look alike, we speak the same language. It is just politics on both sides,” Ravish, the tour guide, says.
An Indian winter is coming to an end. In 12 weeks across two trips – a World Cup and a Test tour – I have visited 13 cities (including Ahmedabad twice), taken 16 internal flights, two long car journeys, a city ferry and bus in Kolkata, super-efficient metro in Hyderabad for just 90p per journey, one rail ride from Agra to Delhi and sat in countless tuk-tuks, the most memorable on World Cup final day when the driver switched between watching the build-up on his phone while adeptly navigating the streets in Ahmedabad to the Narendra Modi Stadium without really looking.
In this time, England mounted the worst-ever defence of a World Cup and the Bazballers let slip a 1-0 lead to lose the Test series. All the while India has expressed itself as a country in transition, confidently steaming ahead, full of optimism about its future – traits that course through its cricket and next generation of superstar players.
This is my 13th time in India, a collection of trips made up of two IPLs, two Champions League Twenty20s, four Test tours, two World Cups, two IPL auctions and one honeymoon. My first visit was for three Tests between India and Pakistan in March 2005, a sign of how times and the world have changed. No chance of that series being played now.
Before the World Cup trip, my last visit was 2016 as England’s 2021 series was closed to visitors because of Covid. India has undergone rapid change in that time as its economic growth has exploded. It was announced last week that India’s economy is galloping ahead at 8.4 per cent in the last quarter and expected to grow 6.8 per cent overall in 2024, the fastest of the G20 countries. Walk a few minutes back to the car park from the border ceremony and this is hammered home. There is a poster for Modi, the prime minister, running for re-election, with his pledge to make India the third-largest economy in the world.
India’s booming economy is partly built on vast infrastructure expenditure, $114 billion (£89 billion) annual spending was announced last week on nationwide projects such as the urban metro in Agra. The construction of gleaming new Taj Mahal Station, surely the most evocatively named tube stop in the world, apes the Hyderabad metro that had a stop right outside the stadium.
Airports have been upgraded or completely rebuilt, making internal travel for a Test tour far smoother than in 2016. Even Rajkot, the fourth biggest city in its state, boasts an international arrivals hall, although England’s charter was the first to use it. Long gone are the days of players roughing it ‘upcountry’ on India tours.
Dharamsala is the final stop-off point and the journey from the border to the Himalayas showed the rapid change sweeping this country with massive construction works widening the national highway up into the rolling hills and mountains from the plains of the Punjab.
Cricket trips take you off the tourist routes. Rajkot in Gujarat and Ranchi in the eastern state of Jharkhand are cities modernising. There are far more high rises and new roads in Rajkot compared to eight years ago, better cars and fewer horses and carts. A new flyover in Ranchi is under construction, although not everyone is keen. Rohit, the gardener at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery, complained the dust and pollution was killing his flowers.
For those present at both the World Cup and this tour, there has been a marked difference in the level of Indian nationalism. It was off the scale in the World Cup, far higher than during the 2011 tournament. Crowds were a sea of blue as fans uniformly wore the India replica shirt with either Virat or Rohit, along with the occasional Dhoni, written on the back. There was silence when the opposition did anything of note, the partisanship dial turned to extreme.
All the plum fixtures were played in the Modi Stadium, Pakistan on to a hopeless cause in front of a hostile 100,000 crowd. With the home team influencing which pitch to play the semi-final on, the notion it was an International Cricket Council-run event fooled only the gullible. Any questions were shot down as anti-Indian. “Morons” wanting to do India down was how Sunil Gavaskar described it. Non-Indian supporters, even some England fans, felt a sense of satisfaction when Australia won, Modi shoving the trophy into the hands of Pat Cummins and skedaddling out of there as quickly as possible.
Modi and his Board of Control for Cricket in India apparatchiks have not been spotted at the Test series, a reflection of the divergent places white-ball and red-ball cricket occupy. Modi has an election to win instead and party flags bearing the Bharatiya Janata Party lotus logo are everywhere, especially in their strongholds on this tour of Dharamsala and Rajkot. Photos of Anurag Thakur, a BJP minister, with the backdrop of the cricket stadium in Dharamsala, look down from posters next to the road-widening works. You can see why cricket carries political clout.
There are 100 million new voters at this election, an IPL demographic to be hoovered up. Of course there is political tension. Riots by farmers outside Delhi over minimum price levels on crops have been violent, and the opposition claims being judicially silenced.
Just days before England landed in India, the consecration ceremony for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya was led by Modi, and saffron flags to mark it are still flying everywhere across the nation on top of houses, cafes and businesses from Visakhapatnam on the south-east coast to Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. Flags hoisted on mosques have caused communal tension. The temple is built on the disputed site of a mosque that was destroyed by Hindu nationalists when England toured here in 1992-93, a symmetry between two cricketing generations.
The Australia tour in 2023 was an exercise in power and geopolitics with Modi and Anthony Albanese, the Australia prime minister, taking a lap of the Modi Stadium in front of cheering BJP supporters.
On this tour, the Test cricket diplomacy has been noticeably British. The High Commission has promoted business links with India at evening events at each Test venue – apart from the dry city of Rajkot – and will culminate in another after the first day’s play in Dharamsala.
Western governments are pivoting towards India, none more so than the UK and Australia. For the UK it is thrashing out a post-Brexit free trade agreement (one of the sticking points is the 150 per cent tax levied on malt whiskey); for Australia and the rest of the world it is a fear of China pushing them into the embrace of India.
Visas are an FTA issue for the UK, and the power the Indian government holds over visitors cast a shadow on England with the Shoaib Bashir affair and clumsy failure to ensure Rehan Ahmed had the right paperwork to re-enter the country. It took diplomacy at governmental level to smooth over both.
India has a median age of 28.2 (the UK is 40.7). Around 65 per cent of the population is under 35. What does this have to do with cricket? Well, like everywhere else, it is the IPL and T20 that holds the young, the big earners of the future, spellbound. Not Test cricket.
Every night Star Sports runs two IPL shows for a competition that has not started yet. The Times of India (circulation 1.8 million) had a huge wrap-around this week advertising the first Indian Street Premier League T10, a tennis ball cricket competition promoted by Sachin Tendulkar; cricket sliced and diced in ways inconceivable a decade ago.
Despite the rise of white-ball, crowds for the series have been good compared to 2016. Weekends have been the best despite many out-of-town venues, and throughout the week school children have been bused in (some in Rajkot travelled 200km) contributing to a good, young vibe. Free tickets swelled attendances but interest has been high, locals keen to stop and talk on the streets, and taxi drivers, too, about the Test series, many loving the Bazballers style.
But it will pale in comparison to the fevered hype of the IPL next month and India’s matches in the United States at June’s Twenty20 World Cup.
No doom-mongering about rise of short-form game
In England there is a lot of negativity around the growth of the Hundred, its place in our cricketing calendar and suspicions about private investment. We fret over the death of red-ball cricket and worry about the sport. There is no doom-mongering in India. It is positive about the future and they bat away accusations of swallowing up most of the ICC cash by shrugging and saying they are making everyone else richer, too, so ‘what’s your problem?’
They want to play Test cricket, too, one England and Wales Cricket Board source saying they essentially challenge them by saying England play five Tests against Australia so why not India? “Are we not as important as Australia?”
It is not all smooth. The Indian board does worry it has created a monster. Last week the BCCI slapped down two IPL guns Shreyas Iyer and Ishan Kishan, dropping their central contracts for not playing domestic state-level cricket. It was muscle-flexing from a board that has seen player power exerted elsewhere (thanks to IPL money).
The England team, cocooned in their hotels, with armed guards ferrying them to grounds and flying on their chartered planes, will be oblivious to India’s transformation except when they look at their IPL salaries.
The IPL rakes in billions of rupees. Its broadcast value per match of $13 million is higher than the Premier League (£10 million). This cash pays for Test cricket, and refurbished grounds. This Test tour has taken in some backwaters, in cricket terms, but the grounds in Rajkot and Ranchi were fine, newish stadiums, built on IPL money with huge practice facilities better than anything in England.
The cricket grounds in Ahmedabad and Lucknow boast nearby big-brand shopping malls, and the Modi Stadium will be at the heart of India’s 2036 Olympic bid, especially now cricket is on the roster of sports, the IOC eager to dip its bread in the pool of broadcast cash available.
The 5G rollout is the second-largest in the world. Uber is everywhere, even the rickshaws use it. Digital is how cricket is being consumed, on one occasion with tragic consequences. A fatal train crash that killed 14 people in October was caused by drivers watching a World Cup match between England-India on their phones. The IPL can be watched for free on mobiles using the Jio app.
The players know this. Look at how new superstar Yashasvi Jaiswal celebrated his Test hundreds against England. Bat and arms aloft in a star shape before blowing kisses to the crowd. It is the Instagram moment. Good for building a player’s brand.
Jaiswal climbed his way up out of poverty. So did Sarfaraz Khan, who, like Jaiswal, grew up playing on the Azad Maidan in Mumbai. Mohammad Siraj’s father was a rickshaw driver, Kuldeep Yadav’s a brick kiln owner. Shubman Gill’s parents were farmers on the border with Pakistan but risked everything to move to Chandigarh so their son could play cricket.
The Indian team has changed, the democratisation away from the middle classes has been accelerated by the IPL as franchises scour the country for untapped talent that could be worth millions. Twenty20 tournaments at state level are highly competitive as trial leagues.
Some of the old problems remain. The travelling supporters complain about dusty, dirty stadiums and officious policing with suncream and water confiscated. It has varied venue to venue and often the case in India is that it eases with each match day as local authorities relax into the game.
But unlike England, ticket revenue is negligible, so the punters do not matter. It is television dosh that pays for everything, the broadcasters’ needs come first. Ironically, it is because the broadcasters want fans at grounds because it makes better background shots, that school children have been allowed in free. You never know, watching the exciting but fallible Bazballers may have converted a few to Test cricket.
Dharamsala is a unique end point. It will be bursting at the seams this week with England supporters as thousands fly in to tick off the world’s most scenic ground. Many are staying in McLeod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama, and Barmy Army T-shirted supporters walking along the narrow lanes alongside red-robed monks is a reminder that cricket tours are to be enjoyed like no other sporting event, especially in India. That bit has not changed.
