Narendra Modi has seized and politicised Indian cricket

“Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.” The first line of Ashis Nandy’s “The Tao of Cricket”, published more than 30 years ago, seems truer than ever. India is hosting the quadrennial Cricket World Cup, which begins on October 5th, as by far the dominant power in the world’s second-biggest game by viewership (after football). The sport is increasingly run according to the demands of Indian administrators, whether in India or the dozen-odd other countries where it is a front-rank pursuit. They are backed by the revenues generated by India’s vast, cricket-mad TV audience. The six-week-long cricket World Cup, which will see the world’s ten strongest national sides compete in the one-day format of the game, may be the richest, most watched and also the most overtly politicised ever held.

More than 712m Indians—roughly the number that watched televised cricket in 2018—are expected to tune in, especially if their team does well, as is predicted. Indian companies are vying for their eyeballs, with unicorns such as Upstox, a fintech firm, and Dream11, a gaming one, joining old stagers such as MRF Tyres among the event’s 18 official sponsors. The World Cup will provide a tableau of India’s economic emergence—and the disruption it is bringing to a game sometimes described as Indians’ single shared passion.