India keeps the bilateral cricket lock on Pakistan, but the multilateral exception is the part that shapes the calendar
India's Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports issued a fresh policy note this week. The headline is the easy bit: bilateral sporting ties with Pakistan stay frozen, no Indian team will travel to Pakistan, and no Pakistani team will travel here for a bilateral series. That part of the framework has been in place for years, and for cricket the meaningful India-Pakistan series stopped happening over a decade ago. The only cricketing line in the new statement that should change how you read your own calendar is the second one: Pakistan players and teams will continue to be allowed to play in India at multilateral events.
Why the bilateral line is mostly noise for cricket
India and Pakistan have not played a bilateral cricket series since 2012-13, when Pakistan toured India for two T20Is and three ODIs across late December and early January. Nothing has come close to a sequel since. The 2026 reaffirmation therefore changes nothing on the ground: it locks in a status quo that has held for thirteen cricketing years and would have continued by default. For an Indian fan looking ahead to the next India versus Pakistan Test series, the answer remains what it has been for the best part of the last decade. It is not happening under the current government's stated position, and probably not in this generation of players either.
The multilateral clause is where the calendar lives
The interesting bit is the explicit acceptance of multilateral events. The ICC's standing arrangement for the 2024-2027 cycle is that whenever an event is hosted by India or Pakistan, the visiting side will play its matches at a neutral venue. We have already seen it twice, in opposite directions. India played their Champions Trophy 2025 matches in the UAE while Pakistan hosted the rest of the event. Pakistan played their Men's T20 World Cup 2026 group games in Sri Lanka while India and Sri Lanka co-hosted the rest of the tournament. The ministry's clarification confirms that the next time India hosts an ICC event, Pakistan can travel here for the slots that fall outside the neutral-venue carve-out.
The next concrete India-Pakistan cricket fixture is already on the schedule. The two sides meet on June 14 at Edgbaston in the ICC Women's T20 World Cup, hosted in England across June and July, with both teams drawn into Group 1. After that the calendar gets more interesting. The Men's Asia Cup is back in 2027, in ODI format this time, and depending on the host country the same neutral-venue arithmetic may need to be invoked again. The Asian Cricket Council still has the cycle's biggest unknown sitting on its desk.
What changes for the broadcast and fan experience
The reaffirmed policy does not change much about which matches we will see. India-Pakistan cricket will continue to exist only inside ICC and ACC tournaments, the broadcasts will stay astronomically priced and astronomically watched, and a bilateral series remains a hypothetical from a different decade. What it does signal, deliberately, is that the multilateral lane is open. If the next ICC men's event in this cycle ends up in India, Pakistan come too, just not to the Indian-soil knockout legs. That is the bit to remember the next time someone says India and Pakistan can never share a stadium roof again. They can. The government has just put it back in writing.
Cricket Updates
