Cricket matches between India and Pakistan have a strong claim to being the world’s most popular sporting event.

Their meeting in this year’s World Cup drew a global television audience estimated by the BBC at one billion, broadly equal to the football World Cup final between Germany and Argentina.

One single cricketing moment between the two countries has been viewed at least ten billion times – Javed Miandad’s last-ball six to snatch a one-day victory in Sharjah in 1986.

Although still without a name or a formal trophy, India-Pakistan Test series have the aura of the Ashes. They have elicited exceptional performances, including Javed’s 280 not out (stranded by Imran Khan’s controversial declaration) in 1983, Virender Sehwag’s triple century (India’s first) in 2004, Sunil Gavaskar’s masterly 96 on an under-prepared track in 1987, Anil Kumble’s ten wickets in an innings in 1999, and Imran’s explosive eight for 60 in 1982.

These series have produced some of the ugliest crowd scenes in cricket history, but also some of the most moving.

When India toured Pakistan in 1954, only a few years after the horrors of Partition, an Indian newspaper recorded Lahore as “crowded with Indians and Pakistanis greeting each other with embraces, some with tears in their eyes, reviving all memories of their days together.”

India-Pakistan Test matches are not only sporting contests but expressions of national identity, which has made them regular casualties of politics.

They did not play each other from 1961 to 1978, an era of permanent tension and two wars. Since then their meetings have alternated spate and drought. They stopped playing Tests after the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 and on the touring Sri Lankans in Lahore the following year. They met in the 2011 and 2015 World Cups, but a short one-day series in India in December 2012 was the last bilateral encounter.

Besides the loss of sporting excellence and excitement, the shutdown entails a severe financial penalty for Pakistan cricket, cut off from the huge revenues generated from Indian media.

The accumulated loss to the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) was recently calculated at $90 million.

The new settlement within the International Cricket Council (ICC) gave the “Big Three”, India, England and Australia, a larger share of revenues from rights to the World Cup and other multilateral contests at the expense of all other cricket-playing countries, making it all the more vital for Pakistan to maximise its revenues from bilateral series.

In May last year, there was high optimism when the PCB and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) signed a Memorandum of Understanding. It envisaged no fewer than six bilateral series between 2015 and 2023, the first this December as a “home” series for Pakistan in the UAE.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, this was signed in the closing days of India’s Congress government. When the rival BJP swept to power under Narendra Modi in May 2014, the BCCI sought approval from the new government for the resumption of bilateral cricket ties.

This was not surprising, for in both countries cricket administration is strongly politicised. It has been a setting for fierce battles between competing political and commercial interests, fought in lurid and dramatic terms through the media and the courts.

In Pakistan, since its inception both civilian and military rulers have appointed the chairman or key executives of the PCB, and frequently suspended its constitution and appointed ad hoc administrators.

The present Patron of Pakistan cricket is the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. He approved a new constitution, under which the experienced diplomat, Shaharyar Khan took office for the second time as chairman of the PCB.

The BCCI has no such formal links with its government. Constitutionally, it is an independent non-profitmaking association of 27 local cricket administrations. But most of these are run by politicians.

Until becoming Prime Minister in June 2014, Narendra Modi was President of the Cricket Association of Gujarat, where he was also chief minister.

The BCCI’s latest annual report recorded total income of over 11 billion rupees (£110 million) in the year ended March 2014, of which over a quarter was passed on to local associations – an attractive source of patronage for influential politicians. By comparison, the PCB’s total revenues for the same period were around £20 million.

The BCCI recently lost its chairman, the veteran industrialist and administrator Jagmohan Dalmiya. He first joined the Board in 1979 and is widely credited for transforming it from an amateur backwater into a cricketing great power.

His comeback in March this year was the latest of many, and followed complex negotiations between power brokers. It ended a long interregnum after the ousting of his rival Narayanaswami Srinivasan, who had been embroiled in two simultaneous scandals.

Srinivasan nonetheless continued to serve as India’s representative on the International Cricket Council (ICC) and is its current Chairman.

The new BCCI Secretary is Anurag Thakur, an ambitious rising BJP politician who had previously run the Cricket Association in the mountainous northern province of Himachal Pradesh. He gave it a wondrously beautiful international stadium in Dharmasala, previously best known as the home of the exiled Dalai Lama.

Thakur made his first-class debut for his association after becoming its President. Batting number 8 he was out for 0 on his seventh ball but captured two wickets with his off-breaks. This lone first-class performance made him eligible to serve as a national selector. The 40-year-old Thakur took a high profile on the BCCI, holding frequent press conferences.

Well acquainted with the dominant personalities of Indian cricket, Shaharyar has undertaken months of diplomacy to persuade India to ratify the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and give the go-ahead for the proposed winter series. He was assured that the BCCI was still committed to the Memorandum, but had submitted it “as a courtesy” for approval by the new Modi government.

Modi made some early conciliatory gestures. He invited Nawaz Sharif to his inauguration and the two countries announced the resumption of long-suspended bilateral talks between their foreign ministers.

But later events in 2014 produced a sharp setback, with a renewed military confrontation between the two countries in disputed Jammu and Kashmir and even over the recognised border.

Modi cancelled the proposed foreign minister talks. Relations deteriorated still further when a Pakistan court freed Zaki-ur Rahman Lakhvi, leader of the terrorist Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT) organization and alleged mastermind of the attack on Mumbai.

However, in May this year, Modi addressed a meeting of BJP MPs. Although he re-stated a freeze on discussions of major issues including terrorism and water he exempted cricket and even said that “we have taken the decision to start a cricket series between both countries to improve our relations.”

Interestingly, the strongest opposition to this came from a former Test cricketer, Kirti Azad.

Throughout this time, Shaharyar received encouragement about the MoU from Dalmiya, re-installed as BCCI chairman, and his contacts among BJP politicians. In July this year, the political climate improved when the Prime Ministers met at an Asian summit in July in the Russian city of Ufa.

Modi accepted an invitation to Pakistan in 2016 for another Asian summit, and they instructed their foreign ministers to draw up a five-point agreement on several contentious issues. This envisaged meetings between the two countries’ national security advisers and the commanders of their border forces.

But there was still no progress on the cricket series.

Apart from high politics, this was also threatened by a major dispute over television rights.

The PCB had an established and lucrative relationship with Ten Sports for broadcasting all of Pakistan’s “home” international matches.

The BCCI objected to Ten Sports. Its owner, Subhash Chandra, was on poor terms with Dalmiya after a bitter legal and personal battle ten years earlier. Worse still, the BCCI believed that Chandra’s Essel Group was in league with the banished Lalit Modi.

No relation of the Prime Minister, Modi had founded the immensely Indian Premier League (IPL) but was suspended from his posts in the League and the BCCI in 2010 after multiple charges of financial and administrative misconduct.

He relocated to London. He was banned for life by the BCCI in 2013, and the Indian government’s Enforcement Division continues to seek his extradition.

The BCCI was especially alarmed that Modi and Chandra were planning to set up not only a competitor to the IPL but rivals to all the national governing bodies of cricket and to the ICC itself.

It asked Shaharyar to blacklist Ten Sports from broadcasting the proposed winter series against India, but this he was unable to do without a written request from the BCCI and at least a matching offer from another company. Neither was forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Ten Sports robustly denied that they were helping Lalit Modi or were involved in any attempt to rival the IPL and the ICC. Early in August, reports in both countries’ media suggested that Ten Sports had indeed satisfied the BCCI and the ICC over the major issue of the breakaway league, and that the one remaining minor issue was open to a negotiated settlement.

However, by that time terrorism and politics had brought a renewed threat to the winter series. Three heavily armed men attacked a police station in Gurdaspur, in Indian Punjab, close to the official border with Pakistan, killing seven people, including a police superintendent, before they were killed themselves.

Indian media and Parliamentarians immediately blamed the Pakistan army and Pakistan’s virtually autonomous intelligence agency, the ISI. They suggested that the attackers could not have acquired their arms or crossed the frontier in a massively fortified area without official connivance.

Immediately, Anurag Thakur, the BCCI Secretary, announced that the cricket series with Pakistan was off. At one of his regular press conferences he declared “When you see such attacks on India time and again, in the Jammu region and now the Punjab, where Indians are losing their lives, as an Indian I don’t see a possibility in that.”

However, the Modi government’s response was more measured and kept alive the possibility of the winter series. Although it warned Pakistan of possible reprisals, it maintained the proposed talks between the two national security advisors and said that investigation of Gurdaspur would be part of their agenda. But amid further cross-border clashes and a dispute over the agenda the talks were abruptly cancelled.

Famous ex-players including Sourav Ganguly, Imran Khan and Shoaib Akhtar declared that the proposed cricket series was doomed, but on September 2, the media reported a final bid by Shaharyar to keep it alive.

On 22 September, he said that its prospects were growing slimmer and added, “We are not pleading with them, we are not kneeling down, we are just telling them that you have signed the MoU and asking whether you are honouring it or not.”

The key has always been Modi.

He dominates his administration and is associated with all of its key initiatives. However, he does not have a free hand as leader of a militantly Hindu party, conditioned to regard Pakistan, and India’s huge Muslim population, as an existential threat.

Modi has vacillated between dialogue and confrontation with Pakistan. The latter may be the easier course for him domestically, but it carries a major economic penalty – and it plays into the hands of terrorist groups in Pakistan, and indeed all the vested interests in Pakistan who have a stake in maintaining India as a permanent enemy.

Modi himself told his party’s MPs he could use the cricket series to signal his hope of a better relationship with India, without weakening on bigger issues.

It is sad that even if he gives the green light to the series, the Indians cannot visit Pakistan. The team and its supporters will not experience the stupendous welcome given to their predecessors in 2004. This led the Indian High Commissioner to tell Shaharyar Khan: “Twenty thousand Indian cricket fans visited Pakistan. You have sent 20,000 Pakistan ambassadors to India.”

Instead, the players and fans would meet each other in the neutral, featureless opulence of the UAE, where cricket has no roots.

But even there, they could demonstrate their shared hope for peace – as they did when India first toured Pakistan in far-off 1954.

Richard Heller is the author of two cricket novels, A Tale of Ten Wickets and The Network.

Peter Oborne is a leading commentator on British and international politics, latterly in the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. He is the author of Basil D’Oliveira, Cricket And Conspiracy: The Untold Story. Assisted by Richard Heller, he published Wounded Tiger, a comprehensive history of Pakistan cricket, in 2014.