ABSTRACT
Whenever a sporting encounter takes place between two sides, a contestation of identities is always at play in one way or another, ranging from club to international rivalries. International cricket is no exception to this trend, with the England-Australia Ashes or the India-Pakistan rivalry amply exemplifying the point. Conventionally, discourses on India-Pakistan cricket since the Partition of the India in 1947 mostly centred around the questions of national identity and communal sentiment against the wider backdrop of political and diplomatic relations between the two countries, brewing one of the fiercest sporting rivalries of the world. Gradually, the cricket enmity assumed an international character with a transnational dimension in the wider context of bilateral political and diplomatic relations. A new element came to complicate this conventional contour of enmity in India-Pakistan cricket from the 1990s – the onset of terrorism as a threat to both countries and their bilateral relations. Cricket, having become a national passion in the subcontinent by that time, naturally fell victim to the spectre of terrorism, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack in the United States.
