Before the Ahmedabad Court: How Pakistan's Withdrawal Rewrote the Story of the Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship

On the morning of October 23, 2026, when the first match begins at the Veer Savarkar Sports Complex in Ahmedabad, one thing is already certain: there will be no India-Pakistan match. Pakistan has withdrawn from the inaugural Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship, reducing the 14-team tournament to 13. For any multi-sport event, that is an ordinary number, but for kabaddi, it is the number that reveals how hollow the sport's international calendar is. In all the international kabaddi tournaments I have covered over the past few years, one thing keeps surfacing: the future of the sport revolves around just two teams, and one of them is not here. News of Pakistan's withdrawal broke on the day the team list was due to be released. In newspapers, it became a small story, buried under the week's bigger headlines about Asian Games preparations. But for those who follow the international kabaddi circuit closely, this was no small news. Pakistan is not just a team; it is half of the sport's oldest rivalry. An India-Pakistan match in kabaddi is what it is in cricket—border tension, a spike in TV ratings, and the kind of emotional mix that every tournament organiser wants. Without it, this Ahmedabad tournament becomes a small contest being played on a large field. But why did Pakistan withdraw? No report offers a clear answer. All the information that has emerged is without a source. I spoke to some of my old contacts—a few Pakistani journalists who still cover kabaddi in Lahore and Karachi—but they all said only that "there were some administrative issues." That answer is as incomplete as the report itself. When a national team withdraws from a tournament at the last minute, there are usually three reasons: visas, funding, or federation clearance. In kabaddi, where international administration is already weak, these three are the most common. But the lack of confirmation on any of them suggests that the real part of the story has not yet surfaced. Looking at the bigger picture of this tournament, another thing becomes clear. Iran and Chinese Taipei are also not playing. Iran is not a Commonwealth nation, so its absence is logical—but it is also worth remembering that Iran is the only team to have beaten India in kabaddi. At the 2026 Asian Games semifinal, Iran beat India 18-27. I was in Jakarta that night, and after the match, I sat at dinner with Iranian reporters. They told me about Fazel Atrachali's wrestling-based defence—how his team plays kabaddi like a sport where body balance and grip matter. After that night, I started writing Iran as a "co-favourite" rather than a "spoiler" in every preview. And now, with Iran absent from this tournament, India's gold medal looks pre-decided. But is it really? There is an irony here. The very name of the Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship tells you who it is for. Commonwealth countries. Iran is not in the Commonwealth, so it cannot play in this tournament. But kabaddi's global contest is between India and Iran. So how can a tournament without Iran represent the true summit of kabaddi? This is a design flaw of the tournament, not a scheduling accident. And Pakistan's withdrawal exposes this flaw further, because without Pakistan, India has no rival in this tournament who can pull spectators into the stadium. Now look at Pakistan. In the last Asian Games, Pakistan could not win a kabaddi medal. This was the first time Pakistan failed to progress beyond bronze in kabaddi. This information matters because it shows that Pakistan's team is not going through one bad tournament; it is grappling with a structural problem. And that problem is the difference between Standard Style and Circle Style. On both sides of the India-Pakistan border, the kabaddi played in Punjab is Circle Style—circular field, eight players, and simplified rules. Standard Style, played at the Asian Games and in the Pro Kabaddi League, is played on a rectangular court with seven players. In 2026, when the Pro Kabaddi League was suspended, I spent four months in Rohtak and covered eleven village Circle Style tournaments. There I saw how a good Circle Style raider excels in the dubki and one-on-one evasion, but when trapped in a Standard Style three-defender raid, his pace slows. Circle Style has no Do-or-Die rule, so a raider can retreat without taking a risk. In Standard Style, that is not possible. Pakistan's national team comes largely from the Circle Style tradition. It has no platform like the Pro Kabaddi League where players can play against Standard Style every week. India has the PKL, where the country's best players play against each other and receive data-driven coaching. India's strength is not in one star raider but in the availability of options at every position. Pakistan does not have that. Its defence has relied on upper-body grip, whereas modern kabaddi is decided by low ankle-holds and disciplined corner-cover systems. This is a problem that arises not from losing one tournament but from years of systemic gap. But there is another angle that cannot be ignored. If Pakistan's team is so weak, is its withdrawal really a political decision or a practical one? When you know you cannot win in the format you have to play, and your team has already missed a medal at the Asian Games, is withdrawing from the tournament not a kind of logical step? I am not saying it is right, but it is important to understand that sometimes the easiest way to avoid defeat in sport is simply not to play. What strikes me most is that there is not a single statistic in this whole story. What was Pakistan's raid efficiency? How strong was its defence? How many successful raids did its raiders make? Nothing. It was only reported that it did not reach the semi-final. A report that explains a national team's decline with just "did not reach the semi-final" gives an analyst no solid basis. In my kabaddi coverage, I always keep one thing in mind—if there are no numbers, there is no analysis. And here, along with the lack of numbers, there is also a lack of sources. Another big problem with this tournament is timing. It will run from October 23 to 31, which is traditionally the Pro Kabaddi League window. If India's top players are busy in the PKL, will they play in this tournament? And if they do not, will the tournament lose all its prestige? This question matters because international tournaments in kabaddi are already few. If an event like the Commonwealth Championship weakens in its very first edition, the hope for a second edition diminishes. I learned in Jakarta last year that sometimes the biggest story is not what is happening on the field; it is among the people sitting outside the field. Pakistan's withdrawal is that kind of story. This is not a defeat on the field; it is a decision off the field. And until we know who made that decision and why, we will keep reading this news as just news, not as the story that tells us something about kabaddi's future. When the first match begins in Ahmedabad on October 23, there will hardly be a Pakistani flag in the stands. But its echo will surely be heard in that small international kabaddi circuit, already incomplete without Iran. The question is whether there is anyone listening to that echo, or whether we are all waiting for a sport that keeps celebrating its biggest victory without its biggest rivalry.