The Best of Frenemies

Australia and India is about more than cricket - but, says GH, don't forget about the cricket

A hardy perennial of Australian foreign policy op ed pages is the 'pivot to India’ screed.  You know the kind, where the pundit reels off some trade stats, goes into an ecstatic trance about the Quad, and incants the phrase ‘world’s democratic superpower’ like it means much anymore in this autocratic age.  It often includes the chin-stroking sentiment that Australian relations with India now transcend the ‘3 Cs’: cricket, curry and Commonwealth. See, for example, here, here, here, and here, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Well, sure, I get it.  But, to be frank, a lot of it still is about the cricket, and bilateral relations would be by no means so sophisticated and robust where it not for this shared sport.  Nor is it trivial that cricket has been a vanguard of cultural projection in both Australia and India.  So, yeah, it reeked of corniness when Narendra Modi turned Anthony Albanese into an electoral prop in Ahmedabad last year.  But the symbolism was unignorable, and the draw that ensued, dreary as it was, had the sense of a diplomatic entente.