The recent strain in India–Bangladesh relations reveals how sport, nationalism, and diplomacy intersect during moments of political tension. This essay examines the IPL controversy, public sentiment, and the broader question of political maturity in a globalised yet fractured world order.
The recent strain in India & Bangladesh relations has taken on a sharper more consequential character and its spillover into the domain of sport needs to be read with sobriety rather than sentimentality. The decision surrounding the exclusion of a Bangladeshi player from the IPL particularly from KKR, is not about personal culpability. It reflects a larger reality where heightened nationalism and public sentiment inevitably shape institutional choices.This is neither unprecedented nor illegitimate. Citizenship carries rights, but it also carries consequences in moments of diplomatic friction, and acknowledging this is part of political maturity, not intolerance.
Bangladesh’s move to approach international bodies demanding a shift of ICC T20 World Cup matches to Sri Lanka appears less like a sporting concern and more like a symbolic political gesture. Sport, in such moments, becomes a language of pressure rather than cooperation. Ironically, India has consistently demonstrated that it treats international athletes with the highest standards of security and professionalism, irrespective of nationality. This record is not asserted rhetorically, it is empirically visible and globally acknowledged. It is also important to underline that the IPL is a domestic league. No sovereign state can be morally compelled to accommodate players from a country where daily public discourse increasingly normalises hostility and hate speech against that very nation. India’s civilisational ethos, rooted in Gandhis Satyagraha, moral restraint, and Vivekananda’s Aurobinod’s spiritual consciousness, Tagores’s synthetic humanism or universal brotherhood, Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism does not glorify war or coercion. It privileges peace, but peace cannot be confused with silence or self negation. But that doesnot means we forgot JP Narayana’s Total Revolution.
As the Bengali saying goes, “ফাঁকা কলসি বাজে বেশি” which means the empty pot makes the loudest noise. In times of tension, restraint speaks louder than provocation, and moral confidence does not require constant performance. A mature democracy responds not with noise, but with principle.
World War III is in the schedule and its realm not a hypothetical saying, and it will hit harder than imagination and eventually we the people will be distinct.
- Sanjay Biswas