When the AFL Courts Power, Who Gets Left Behind?

There is a photograph doing the rounds this week that has generated considerably more conversation than the AFL Commission probably anticipated when it planned the optics. AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon, alongside Cricket Australia’s own ambassadors, smiling in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — and for many Australians of South Asian and Muslim background, that image has landed like a stone dropped into still water, with ripples still spreading.

I want to approach this carefully, because the topic deserves more than heat. It deserves clarity. And as someone who covers the Commission’s governance and strategic direction rather closely, I think there is a genuinely important question buried beneath the understandable emotion: when Australian sporting bodies talk about inclusion, who exactly are they including, and on whose terms?

The India Strategy Is Real, and It Matters

Let’s start with the obvious. The AFL’s interest in the Indian diaspora is not a recent invention, and it is not inherently cynical. Australia has a substantial and growing Indian-Australian community. Several clubs — my own Adelaide Crows among them — have actively worked to bring South Asian Australians into the fold, running programs in cricket-mad communities, hosting cultural events, and genuinely trying to broaden the game’s reach beyond its Anglo-Celtic heartland.

That work is real, and plenty of people have benefited from it. The strategic dimension — building a potential broadcast market, attracting sponsorship dollars, imagining a future where the AFL is a genuinely pan-Asian code — does not automatically make the community engagement hollow. Sport and commerce have always coexisted, sometimes uncomfortably, in this country.

But strategy and inclusion are not the same thing. Strategy serves the institution. Inclusion, properly understood, serves the people. The moment they come apart — the moment the community is a means to an end rather than the end itself — is the moment trust begins to erode.

Why the Modi Meeting Has Struck a Nerve

Narendra Modi is a complicated figure on the global stage, and I will not pretend otherwise. For many Hindu nationalists, he is a transformative leader who has elevated India’s standing and pride. For many Muslims, Dalits, and religious minorities within India, his government’s record on communal violence, citizenship laws, and press freedom raises serious and documented concerns. Both of those realities exist simultaneously, and they cannot be handwaved away.

When Australian sporting institutions enter that frame — smiling, glad-handing, seeking partnership — they are not operating in a political vacuum. They are making a choice about which version of India they are engaging with, and implicitly, whose experience of that leadership they are choosing to elevate or to overlook.

Many Indian-Australians who are Muslim, or who are from communities that have felt the sharp edge of sectarian politics back home, are watching those photographs and drawing their own conclusions about how much their presence in the tent actually matters beyond the headline diversity numbers.

This Is Not About Asking Sport to Fix the World

I want to be precise here, because critics will fairly argue that sport cannot be expected to adjudicate every geopolitical dispute. The AFL does not set foreign policy. Andrew Dillon is not the Foreign Minister. If Australian sporting bodies refused to engage with every government whose human rights record drew criticism, the list of permissable partners would become very short indeed.

That argument has merit, and I don’t dismiss it. But it is not quite the argument being made by those who feel unsettled by this week’s imagery. The objection is not simply that the AFL met with Modi. The objection is the enthusiasm of the embrace, the absence of any apparent nuance, and the contrast between how carefully these institutions manage their domestic inclusion messaging and how carelessly they appear to manage the international equivalent.

You can engage with a foreign leader without a wide grin and a bear hug. Diplomacy is a spectrum. The question is whether the optics were considered at all, or whether those who might be hurt by them simply weren’t in the room when the decisions were made.

The Commission’s Governance Blind Spot

From a pure governance perspective — and this is where I spend most of my time thinking about the AFL — there is a structural issue worth naming. The Commission has invested heavily in inclusion frameworks: the Pride Game, the Sir Doug Nicholls Round, the multicultural programs. These are not trivial commitments, and the people who run them often do so with genuine conviction.

But the Commission’s international engagement strategy appears to sit in a separate silo, one where the inclusion lens is not routinely applied. When the AFL travels to meet foreign governments or pursue broadcast rights deals, the cultural and political sensitivities that are now fairly standard practice domestically do not seem to travel with them.

That is a governance gap. It is the kind of gap that produces avoidable embarrassments, that erodes community trust built over years of patient work, and that exposes the institution to the charge — fairly or unfairly — that the inclusion rhetoric was always primarily a domestic marketing exercise.

What Genuine Inclusion Would Actually Look Like

If the AFL is serious — and I believe significant parts of the organisation genuinely are — then the path forward is not to pull back from the Indian market or the Indian diaspora. The opportunity is real and the community engagement to date has produced genuine connections. Abandonig all of that would be a different kind of failure.

What genuine inclusion looks like, though, is consulting the full breadth of Indian-Australian communities before decisions of this kind are made. It means having Muslim Australians, Dalit Australians, and others with a complicated relationship to Indian politics at the table when the strategy is being formulated — not as an afterthought once the photographs have gone viral.

It means being willing to acknowledge, even in measured and diplomatic terms, that not everyone in the community you are courting looks at those photographs with the same eyes. That acknowledgment costs nothing and signals a great deal.

A Question Worth Sitting With

I have been covering the AFL Commission’s strategic direction for long enough to know that these institutions are not monoliths. There are people within AFL House who will read the criticism of this week’s imagery and genuinely wince. There are people who will have raised concerns internally and been overruled by the commercial imperative. That is the nature of large organisations.

But the question that Rana Hussain and others like her have posed this week is not going away, and it deserves a genuine response rather than a form letter about the AFL’s commitment to diversity. The question is simple: when you say everyone is welcome in our game, do you mean it even when it costs you something? Even when it means pausing an exciting commercial opportunity to make sure the people you are trying to include actually feel included?

Australian sport, at its best, has genuinely grappled with questions like these and come out stronger for it. The expansion of AFLW, the genuine progress on First Nations recognition, the gradual broadening of what a footy crowd looks like in 2024 — none of that was easy, and all of it required the institution to put community ahead of convenience at key moments.

This is one of those moments. The Indian-Australian community is watching. So is everyone else who has been told they belong here. The Commission would do well to listen carefully before the next round of photographs is taken.