Indian women clinch Asia Cup in Dubai and retain Asian Games gold in Nagoya amid political spotlight
Over the past 10 days, the Indian women's cricket team secured their eighth Asia Cup title in Dubai and defended their Asian Games gold medal in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, tournament reports published on September 26, 2026 said. The on-field successes were accompanied by intense public and broadcast attention on ceremonial moments rather than the players' individual statistics.
Women's cricket in India has long contended with demands for pay parity, limited access to premier venues and secondary billing from broadcasters, and the team has repeatedly had to assert its place alongside the more established men's game. Despite those structural challenges, recent coverage has often focused less on the team's cricketing progress and more on off-field optics; notable performances have competed for attention with questions about trophy presentations and VIP appearances. Deepti Sharma finished the Asia Cup with her 14th wicket, the most by any bowler in the tournament, while Smriti Mandhana surpassed India’s Mithali Raj to become the leading run-scorer in international cricket and overtook Australia’s Meg Lanning to record the most number of centuries under her bat.
In the Asia Cup final, broadcasters repeatedly cut to the VIP stand in the closing overs and viewers saw ACC chairman Mohsin Naqvi — who is also Pakistan’s Interior Minister and the Pakistan Cricket Board’s chief — on camera. The visuals of the final wicket and the match victory were interrupted as cameras showed Naqvi speaking with BCCI Secretary Devajit Saikia, an exchange the coverage treated as a focal moment.
The present attention draws on a pattern that began in 2025: months after a terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam and a subsequent military skirmish between India and Pakistan, the Indian men's team played the Asia Cup amid calls for a boycott. The men's captain Suryakumar Yadav refused to shake hands with opponents, spectators celebrated by lifting an imaginary trophy, and players delayed accepting the winner's trophy in a moment described as having “humiliated” Naqvi by making him wait. Prime Minister Narendra Modi later described that victory as “Operation Sindoor on the games field.”
Journalists pressed similar questions on the Indian women's squad ahead of another series in late 2025; Deepti Sharma replied, “We are not focusing on the Asia Cup at the moment... our focus is on this series.” When India later faced Pakistan on the field, the women did not shake hands with their opponents. The pattern reappeared in June 2026 during the T20 World Cup in England when Harmanpreet Kaur's side again refused to shake hands with the Fatima Sana-led Pakistani team, and in September 2026 the same Dubai stadium saw Mohsin Naqvi present but not hand over the Asia Cup trophy. “What the men had started, the women have continued,” the audience rejoiced as this sequence repeated, and while the Indian players received gold medals at the Asian Games in Japan, the crowd remained preoccupied with the possibility of Naqvi appearing in a presentation; he did not.
The rivalry between Indian and Pakistani women's teams has a limited competitive history compared with the men's fixtures: the sides first met in 2005 and thereafter only in international tournaments rather than bilateral series, with fewer than 30 matches between them in which India has generally been dominant. By contrast, Indian and Australian women have met in excess of 100 matches, including Tests. The article attributes part of this divergence to entrenched patriarchal mindsets that delayed the establishment and growth of women's cricket: the sport began in India in the 1970s, while Pakistani women took roughly two more decades to start playing.
The refusal to shake hands is described as a BCCI directive applicable to all teams under its governance when facing Pakistan, and the organisation's handling of fixtures without bilateral ties has consequences for how such matches are staged and monetised. The lack of regular bilateral series increases the emotional and commercial value of occasional international meetings, the piece argues, leaving the board to choose between skipping fixtures or staging them without customary on-field courtesies; it recalls that in the early 2000s India declined invitations to tri-nation events and the Asian Test Championship after the Kargil War and amid unrest in the Kashmir valley.
As the Indian women's team continues to add new metal to its trophy cabinet, it is entering a public sphere in which on-field achievements are viewed alongside political gestures and broadcast theatre. If previously the BCCI and political leaders were slow to notice the women's team, the coverage around recent finals suggests they are now acutely attentive to moments where cameras can capture players not shaking hands.
