Nigar Sultana did not shake Harmanpreet’s hand, and her own board says that was not their idea
The BCB has distanced itself from its captain’s handshake snub in Dubai, with a bilateral tour of India still unscheduled and Nigar Sultana’s future in the job due a review once the Asian Games are over.
Sep 13, 2026
Nigar Sultana Joty kept her hands to herself at the toss in Dubai on Thursday, and three days later her own board has gone out of its way to say that was nobody’s idea but hers. The Bangladesh captain did not shake Harmanpreet Kaur’s hand before the Women’s Asia Cup semi-final on 10 September. Bangladesh lost by 40 runs and went out. Now the Bangladesh Cricket Board has distanced itself from the gesture and confirmed that her captaincy gets looked at once the Asian Games are over.
Her decision, not ours, says the BCB
Rafiqul Islam Babu, who chairs the BCB’s women’s committee, was blunt about where the board stands.
“Of course, it was her own decision,” Babu said. “We believe sports bring the world together. We want friendly relations with all countries, not just India, and so whatever she did was entirely her personal decision.”
That is a board defending a player’s right to make a choice while making very sure nobody thinks the choice came out of a committee room in Mirpur. The second half of that quote is doing far more work than the first.
Bangladesh have a tour they badly want
The careful wording is not hard to explain. Tamim Iqbal was elected BCB president in June 2026, and one of the jobs he inherited was getting India to tour Bangladesh. Three ODIs and three T20Is were supposed to be played there in September 2026. They are not being played, and at the end of August Tamim was still talking about finding a slot.
“Both boards are very sincere that this thing happens,” he said on 31 August. “We are looking at windows as well.”
A Bangladesh captain refusing a handshake with the India captain is not what Dhaka wanted in the middle of those conversations.
A gesture that had only pointed one way
The refused handshake has been part of Asian cricket for a year now, and until Thursday it had a single direction of travel. The BCCI adopted the position at the 2025 men’s Asia Cup after the Pahalgam attack, and India’s women held the same line against Pakistan at the World Cup in October 2025. Harmanpreet did not shake Fatima Sana’s hand at the toss when the two sides met earlier in this tournament either.
Nigar picking up the gesture and aiming it at India is what turned this into a story rather than a footnote. The two teams have history, including the tied ODI in Mirpur in July 2023 when Harmanpreet hit the stumps on her way off and Nigar said afterwards that the India captain could have shown better manners. A handshake snub at a toss is something else again.
The scoreboard gave her no cover
Whatever the board makes of the handshake, the cricket left Nigar with nothing to hide behind. India made 149 for 6 at the Dubai International Stadium, built around Shafali Verma’s 64 from 40 balls, and Bangladesh were held to 109 for 7. Deepti Sharma took 3 for 26.
Babu did not dress up the performance either. “There are many shortcomings in the team,” he said. “We have not been able to beat the bigger teams. We played well in the World Cup too but lost because of small mistakes.”
The review waits for Japan
Babu said the results and a complaint lodged against Nigar over her conduct had both been discussed with the board president, and that nothing gets decided while the squad is away.
“First, we will see how the team performs at the Asian Games, then decide what needs to be done,” he said.
Nigar was named captain of the Asian Games squad, which goes to Aichi-Nagoya later this month and starts at the quarter-final stage. She leads Bangladesh into that knowing the review begins the day she gets home. India, for their part, play Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup final in Dubai on Sunday, their sixth final from six editions of the T20 tournament.