From Pitch to Politics: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Asia Cup 2025 Controversy of Othering on Twitter

Abstract

The rise of social media has transformed political communication by enabling politicians to engage directly with audiences and construct ideological narratives in real time. This study investigates how political actors construct political positioning through digital discourse during the Asia Cup 2025 controversy. Grounded in Teun A. van Dijk's Socio-Cognitive Model (2006), with primary analytical focus on the Ideological Square, this study examines how political actors construct positive self-representation and negative other-representation through discourse strategies. Despite growing interest in digital statecraft, limited empirical attention has been paid to how transnational sporting crises are rapidly weaponized as event-driven ideological battlegrounds by political actors on social media.

To address this gap, this study utilizes a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework to analyze a precise, targeted dataset of five purposively selected English-language tweets posted by verified political actors from Pakistan and India during the peak controversy period. The micro-level analysis systematically examines key textual parameters: lexicalization, pronoun usage, actor description, evaluative expressions, rhetorical emphasis, and in-group/out-group construction.

Within this limited dataset, the findings suggest that selected political actors contributed to transforming the Asia Cup 2025 controversy from a sporting issue into a site of ideological contestation. Across the selected tweets, these strategies framed politicians as legitimate, patriotic, and morally superior while portraying opponents as dishonest, disloyal, manipulative, or threatening. The study demonstrates that Twitter functions not merely as a platform for communication but as a discursive arena where political identities, nationalism, and ideological polarization are actively constructed. The research contributes to existing scholarship by providing a micro-level discourse analysis of political positioning within an event-driven digital context in South Asia.