“THE fight between brothers is always the toughest,” said Prajhbit, who had travelled 1,300km from Delhi to Kolkata for a game of cricket lasting three hours. Prajhbit was one of over 60,000 people crammed into Eden Gardens in Kolkata on Saturday to witness India’s game with Pakistan in the World Twenty20, the tournament that showcases the shortest format of the game. As ever when these two sides meet, it was about more than a contest between bat and ball. "As far as the Indians and Pakistanis go, I don't think they watch this game as a game of cricket. It's more of a border rivalry,” said Ravichandran Ashwin, an Indian bowler, before the fixture. Mike Marqusee, an American writer, believed India-Pakistan cricket matches to be the fiercest rivalry in all of sport.



Ever since the first match in 1952, the fixture has resonated far beyond the cricket field. It has frequently been used as an avenue for leading politicians in both countries to meet—”cricket diplomacy”, in the term coined by General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the former president of Pakistan. Zia ul-Haq had used a surprise visit to watch a Test in Jaipur in 1987 as a way to soothe rising tensions between the two countries. In 2004, Dina Wadia, the only child of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, travelled to watch a match in Pakistan, the first time she had set foot in the country since her father’s funeral in 1948.



There have often been shows of great warmth between teams and supporters. When India first toured Pakistan in 1955, the Wagah border crossing was left open and 10,000 Indian fans travelled to watch a Test match in Lahore. After Pakistan won a close match at Chennai in 1999, and India a tight game at Karachi in 2004, opposing fans applauded them rapturously. During India’s tour in 2004, it was joked that some Pakistanis even feigned being Indian because of the hospitality they received. But it is not always thus. In 1997, the Indian team left the field during a match in Karachi after being pelted with stones. At Kolkata two years later, stones and plastic bottles were hurled onto the pitch in protest at an umpiring decision; over 60,000 fans were evicted from the stands before the game was played out in front of an empty ground.



When played in India, matches have sometimes exacerbated tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. During the 1990s, Bal Thackeray, the leader of Shiv Sena, a far-right party associated with Hindu nationalism, said he wanted to see Indian Muslims “with tears in their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan,” to prove they did not secretly support their neighbours north of the border. In 1991, Shiv Sena vandalised the pitch in Bombay, where Pakistan were due to play a game two days later, and the entire tour was eventually cancelled. In 1999, the group repeated the trick in Delhi, though the game proceeded without trouble. After a World Cup match in 2003, a Muslim was killed in Ahmedabad after rioting linked to the game.



Whether fixtures have been played at all usually depends on the state of India-Pakistan relations. Between 1962 and 1977, cricket between the two countries stopped, largely because of the wars of 1965 and 1971. (When not in a forced hiatus, games become so frequent as to risk being devalued: the pair played 31 games between March 2004 and April 2006.) Players are not immune to the tensions. "A defeat against Pakistan means media would roast us and fans would pelt stones at our house," said Harbhajan Singh, an Indian spin bowler, last year. In Test cricket, where draws are possible, players have resorted to stultifying, conservative cricket, so as to avoid the repercussions of a defeat. Sixty-four per cent of Tests between the countries have been drawn, double the overall rate in Test history.



The players in Saturday’s match did not have that luxury: there are no draws in Twenty20. Stakes were particularly high, in part because defeat would have left India with a good chance of being eliminated from the tournament they are hosting, but also because matches between the two countries have been so rare in recent years. Since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, which were carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist group, the countries have only organised three matches against one another—a brief one-day international series in India in 2012-13.



The impasse has been debilitating for the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). In “Wounded Tiger: A History of Cricket in Pakistan”, Peter Oborne estimates that Pakistan earns $70m in broadcasting rights from each tour by India, far more than from any other series. The PCB has attempted to resume cricketing ties with its neighbour. In 2014 a deal was signed to play six bilateral series between 2015 and 2023. But the first, scheduled for late last year, was abandoned after the Indian government refused to give permission for the team to play in the United Arab Emirates. (Pakistan has been forced to play its “home” matches in UAE after terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team’s bus as they travelled to play a match in Lahore in 2009.)



Hence, in recent years matches between India and Pakistan have been restricted to world events, where fixtures are determined by the luck of the draw, not by the whim of politicians and administrators. Yet, even at the World Twenty20, there were doubts whether Saturday’s game would go ahead. It was originally scheduled to be played in the remote Himalayan city of Dharamsala. When that region’s chief minister said that he could not guarantee safety, the game had to be moved 2,000km at ten days’ notice.



Still, as MS Dhoni, India’s captain, hit the winning run to complete a comfortable victory, no one in Kolkata was complaining. The game was played in a warm atmosphere—Indian fans applauded Pakistan’s national anthem, and the Indian and Pakistani “superfans” sat next to each other. It extended India’s winning streak over Pakistan in World Cups or WT20s to eleven unbroken games. “This is the final for us,” said Prem, who travelled from Ranchi for the game. Evidently the fans, draped in Indian tricolours and riding motorbikes in celebration into the early hours of Sunday morning, agreed.