While the Indian hockey team is yet to take on to the ground, the newly launched jerseys for the upcoming tournament has courted controversy.
Hockey India insists the switch to orange came down to technical and design reasons. Opposition leaders, former players and plenty of fans aren’t convinced — to them, this has stopped being about sport.
Blue has been the team’s colour for decades, through various shades and redesigns. So when Hockey India rolled out a predominantly saffron kit for both the men’s and women’s squads ahead of the tournament in the Netherlands and Belgium, it didn’t take long for the reaction to spill across social media and into political circles
Former captain and Olympian Viren Rasquinha was among the first and loudest critics. On X, he pushed back hard, saying blue has always been Indian hockey’s identity and legacy, and asking plainly what the logic behind orange even was. He later walked back any political framing, insisting his issue was about protecting tradition, not taking side.
The row then took a political. Pargat Singh — former India captain, now a Congress MLA — argued the change fit a pattern of the BJP tying everything back to saffron. His view: governments should be pouring energy into infrastructure and athlete support, not uniform colours. Sport, he said, ought to stay out of politics altogether.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra weighed in too, arguing that swapping jerseys — or rewriting history, for that matter — doesn’t change what the country actually is. Her comments only added fuel to an already heated debate.
Hockey India has pushed back firmly against all of it. According to the federation, the orange draws directly from the national flag and is meant to represent courage, sacrifice and victory, while navy blue accents nod to the Ashoka Chakra and stand for peace and progress. The design carries it further too — mandala artwork reinterpreting the Sudarshan Chakra, tricolour touches worked in, and “India” written out in Devanagari script.
Hockey India president Dilip Tirkey has also brushed aside any talk of political motive. The switch, he said, actually came from players, coaches and support staff themselves, who’d flagged that blue jerseys kept merging into the blue turf and made it tougher to spot players mid-match. Orange, he said, will be the primary kit for this World Cup, with white as backup — and he left the door open to revisiting the choice down the line if needed
Fans, meanwhile, are split much the same way. One side sees nothing wrong with saffron, pointing out it’s simply one of the colours on the national flag. The other insists blue has become too tied to hockey’s identity in India to be swapped out without good reason.