The sun was still rising one peaceful morning in late June 2022 when Constable Abdulgfar Saiyedali received an unusual telephone call from a friend. He was at police headquarters in Mehsana, a city of about 215,000 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where he works as an officer in the Special Operations Group, a national unit that mainly covers narcotics, weapons and counterterrorism.

The friend had a tip for Saiyedali. A perplexing cricket tournament was taking place in Molipur, a farming village about 30 miles away that’s populated largely by Sunni Muslims. The matches looked rudimentary, played by local amateurs on dried-out farmland, yet they were being recorded as though for broadcast, and the umpire was either manipulating the rules or didn’t know them at all.