Less than a week before the Kho Kho World Cup kicks off with the marquee India-Pakistan clash in New Delhi, Pakistan’s men and women teams are yet to be granted visas to travel across the border for the tournament.
The inaugural Kho Kho World Cup is set to be held from January 13-19 at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in the capital, and the India and Pakistan women’s teams are scheduled to play the opening match. That remains in doubt with the Pakistani contingent still uncertain of their participation.
“The Pakistan team is still awaiting their visas,” Sudhanshu Mittal, BJP leader and President, Kho Kho Federation of India (KFFI), told The Indian Express.
If no solution is found, Pakistan will have to forfeit and the opening match will instead see the Indian men’s team take on Nepal. “When we made the schedule, we had hoped for it to go as planned. But this is not really in our control, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has not approved their application so we are still not sure if they can travel to play,” Geeta Sudan, COO of the Kho Kho World Cup, said.
Embittered sporting ties have persisted between the two nations for over a decade, and the impasse has been revived this month over India’s refusal to go to Pakistan for the Champions Trophy cricket tournament, set to take place between February 19 and March 9.
Despite Pakistan being approved as the sole host of the tournament as far back as 2021, Indian authorities, citing terror concerns, refused to travel to the country to participate. In return, they did not forfeit from the tournament, but instead, were accommodated by the International Cricket Council (ICC) – whose newly-elected chair, Jay Shah, is the former BCCI secretary – in the form of a hybrid model that has been used in the past. All of India’s matches, one semifinal, and the final (if India qualify) will now take place in Dubai instead.
The latest showdown has further frozen sporting relations that had shown signs of easing in the recent past. Sports teams from Pakistan had travelled to India as recently as 2023. Their men’s hockey team played the Asian Champions Trophy that year, while the men’s cricket team, after much deliberation and last-minute schedule changes, played the 2023 ICC ODI World Cup too. Pakistan had also played the SAFF football championship in the summer of 2023 in Bengaluru.
While more sparingly, Indian sports teams have recently travelled to Pakistan too. Their bridge team travelled to Lahore in 2023 while early last year, after a failed appeal to keep it in a neutral venue, the Indian Davis Cup tennis team travelled to Islamabad for their World Group 1 playoff tie.
“All the other teams will be travelling as planned and we hope to put on a good show regardless (of Pakistan potentially missing the tournament),” Sudan said.
The tournament, first of its kind, will see 20 men’s and women’s teams from 24 different countries participate in a big boost to the stakeholders of the sport that hope to boost the indigenous game to a broader audience and give it greater competitive legitimacy.
“This is essentially an indigenous sport. It has also been played in parts of Asia and Africa for long, but after the International Kho Kho Federation (IKKF) was developed in 2017, it has spread to places like England and the US. We hope to showcase the best of it this month,” Sudan added.
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