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It is merely in the past few seasons that female athletes in the South Asian region have gained recognition as professional cricket players. Over many years, they endured scorn, censure, ostracism – even the threat of violence – to follow their passion. Now, India is hosting a World Cup with a prize fund of $13.8 million, where the home nation's athletes could emerge as national treasures if they secure their first championship win.

It would, then, be a great injustice if the upcoming talk centered around their men's teams. However, when India confront Pakistan on Sunday, comparison are inevitable. Not because the host team are highly favoured to win, but because they are not expected to shake hands with their rivals. Handshakegate, as it's been dubbed, will have a fourth instalment.

If you missed the original drama, it took place at the conclusion of the men's group match between India and Pakistan at the continental championship last month when the India skipper, Suryakumar Yadav, and his squad hurried off the pitch to avoid the customary post-game post-match ritual. Two same-y follow-ups transpired in the Super4 match and the championship game, climaxing in a protracted award ceremony where the title winners declined to accept the cup from the Pakistan Cricket Board's head, Mohsin Naqvi. It would have been humorous if it hadn't been so tragic.

Observers of the female cricket World Cup might well have hoped for, and even pictured, a alternative conduct on Sunday. Female athletics is supposed to offer a new blueprint for the industry and an different path to negative legacies. The image of Harmanpreet Kaur's players offering the hand of camaraderie to Fatima Sana and her team would have made a powerful statement in an ever more polarized world.

It might have recognized the mutually adverse environment they have overcome and provided a symbolic reminder that political issues are temporary compared with the bond of female solidarity. It would certainly have earned a place alongside the additional positive narrative at this tournament: the exiled Afghanistan players invited as observers, being brought back into the game four years after the Taliban drove them from their homes.

Rather, we've collided with the firm boundaries of the sporting sisterhood. No one is shocked. India's male cricketers are huge stars in their homeland, idolized like gods, treated like nobility. They enjoy all the privilege and power that accompanies fame and money. If Yadav and his side are unable to defy the diktats of an authoritarian leader, what hope do the female players have, whose improved position is only recently attained?

Maybe it's more astonishing that we're continuing to discuss about a simple greeting. The Asia Cup furore prompted much analysis of that particular sporting tradition, especially because it is considered the ultimate marker of fair play. But Yadav's snub was far less significant than what he said immediately after the first game.

Skipper Yadav considered the victory stand the "perfect occasion" to devote his team's win to the military personnel who had taken part in India's attacks on Pakistan in May, referred to as Operation Sindoor. "I hope they continue to motivate us all," Yadav told the post-match interviewer, "and we give them further cause in the field each time we get an opportunity to bring them joy."

This is where we are: a real-time discussion by a sporting leader openly celebrating a armed attack in which many people died. Previously, Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja was unable to display a solitary humanitarian message past the ICC, not even the dove logo – a literal sign of peace – on his bat. Yadav was subsequently fined 30% of his match fee for the remarks. He wasn't the only one sanctioned. Pakistan's Haris Rauf, who imitated plane crashes and made "6-0" signals to the audience in the later game – similarly alluding to the conflict – was given the identical penalty.

This isn't a matter of not respecting your rivals – this is sport appropriated as nationalistic propaganda. It's pointless to be morally outraged by a missing handshake when that's merely a minor plot development in the narrative of two nations actively using cricket as a political lever and instrument of proxy war. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made that explicit with his social media post after the final ("Operation Sindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins!"). Naqvi, for his part, proclaims that athletics and governance shouldn't mix, while holding dual roles as a government minister and chair of the PCB, and directly mentioning the Indian prime minister about his country's "humiliating defeats" on the battlefield.

The takeaway from this episode shouldn't be about cricket, or India, or the Pakistani team, in separation. It serves as a caution that the notion of ping pong diplomacy is over, for the time being. The same sport that was employed to foster connections between the countries 20 years ago is now being utilized to heighten hostilities between them by people who know exactly what they're attempting, and huge fanbases who are eager participants.

Division is infecting every aspect of society and as the most prominent of the global soft powers, athletics is always vulnerable: it's a type of leisure that directly invites you to choose a team. Many who find India's actions towards Pakistan aggressive will nonetheless champion a Ukrainian tennis player's entitlement to refuse to greet a Russian competitor on the court.

If you're still kidding yourself that the athletic field is a protected environment that brings nations together, review the golf tournament recap. The behavior of the New York crowds was the "ideal reflection" of a leader who enjoys the sport who publicly provokes animosity against his adversaries. We observed not just the erosion of the usual sporting values of equity and shared courtesy, but how quickly this might be normalized and tacitly approved when sportspeople themselves – such as US captain Keegan Bradley – refuse to recognise and penalize it.

A post-game greeting is supposed to represent that, at the end of every competition, however intense or heated, the competitors are putting off their simulated rivalry and recognizing their shared human bond. If the enmity is genuine – demanding that its athletes emerge in vocal support of their respective militaries – then why are you bothering with the sporting field at all? It would be equivalent to don the fatigues now.