It is customary when India play Pakistan at cricket to dwell on the astonishing scale and sweep of the spectacle. The usual starting figure of half a billion global television viewers is expected for both teams’ opening Champions Trophy game on Sunday at Edgbaston. There will, of course, be the usual fascination beyond the sports pages, too, at a group-stage game of a moderately sized competition in a glitzed-up old colonial sport that can still feed out into a wider geopolitical obsession. Perhaps the notion of cricket diplomacy will once again be raised, the idea that playing one another at cricket might somehow act as a balm to an irreconcilably raw neighbourly partition.
In which case everyone involved had better get a shift on. The Kashmir border between these two nations remains one of the most dangerous places in the world, stage for a constant “dirty war”, with the shadow of scattered short-range nuclear weapons always lurking. For all the hands-across-the-boundary-rope noises around Edgbaston, India’s sports minister, Vijay Goel, announced only this week that there would be no return to bilateral relations, declaring that “cricket and terrorism can’t go hand in hand”.
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