It is rare for a visit by a foreign dignitary to India to turn into a raging controversy. The 2018 visit by then Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau generated heat because of his party’s links with pro-Khalistanis, and the government’s deliberate cold-shouldering of the visit for this reason.
By comparison, the “acting” foreign minister of Afghanistan (the descriptor denotes the absence of international recognition for the Taliban regime) Amir Khan Muttaqi was expected to face no such difficulties. If anything, his visit, supported as it was by the Modi government and by its legion of strategic and national security experts, was all set to be projected as a triumph of the government’s foreign policy.
If that’s not quite how it turned out, it is because both Muttaqi, and his co-operative hosts, seemed to forget that Delhi is not Kabul.From Kandahar to Kabul: A Troubled History
But first, a rewind is in order. After the 15 August, 2021 takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, there was little doubt that India, after its initial withdrawal and disengagement from the country, would have to eventually get to the table with this medieval-minded group of armed Islamists.
The Taliban were mid-wifed by Pakistan’s ISI in the 1990s. They had welcomed the Al Qaeda and its chief Osama bin Laden, helped in the ISI-backed hijack of IC-814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar, and were involved in the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed more than 60 people, including an Indian foreign service officer and an Indian Army brigadier, and targeted scores of Indian nationals working in projects in Afghanistan.
Yet, in geopolitics, as indeed in all politics, there are no permanent friends, nor permanent enemies. India has, for all intents and purposes, turned the page on its bad history and even worse memories of the Taliban. Within a year of the Taliban establishing themselves at the Arg Palace in Kabul, India reopened its embassy with a “technical” team, in other words, a security and intelligence agencies dominated contingent.Even without international recognition for the regime, several countries have diplomatic presence, some more than others. The US has remained engaged with the Taliban through its ally Qatar. The wisdom from history has been that international isolation of this group, with its own bizarre interpretations of Islam, sharia, and Pakhtunwali, is far more dangerous than engaging with it.
Reclaiming a Toehold in Afghanistan
For India, the additional attraction has been the opportunity to regain a toehold in a country that Delhi had all but given up in the immediate chaotic aftermath of the Taliban takeover.
When the Americans warred against the Taliban from 2001 to 2021, India thrilled in its involvement in the redevelopment of Afghanistan. Roads, dams, schools- no project was too small or too big. Alongside grew the friendship of the Afghan people.
All that seemed history on that August day in 2021, when the then ISI chief, Faiz Hameed, was photographed in Kabul’s five star Serena Hotel drinking tea, his face wreathed in a smug smirk.
Cracks in the Taliban-Pakistan Alliance
India’s civilisational and cultural ties with Afghanistan, and the warm people-to-people bonds between Indians and Afghans over the ages, has always been problematic for Pakistan. Now Islamabad had an ally back in place in Kabul, or so it believed.
Few could tell then that this relationship would be the first to unravel – over the Taliban’s show of independence from the ISI, over the historically problematic Durand Line, and the apparently close relationship between the Afghan Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which has carried out relentless terrorist strikes inside Pakistan.
The break was most dramatically visible when India launched Operation Sindoor against Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam terrorist outrage. The Taliban regime in Kabul came out in support of India’s military actions, only one of three other countries/entities to do so.Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar spoke with Muttaqi at the time, thanking him for the regime’s support, and setting the stage for Muttaqi’s visit to India. The Indian media hailed the visit as “historic”, and praised India’s “nuanced” foreign policy vision. Delhi seemed to warm to its visitor more when Pakistan bombed Kabul and other areas within hours of Muttaqi’s arrival in the Indian capital.
“Kabul Rules” Come to Delhi
Whether it was the red-carpet welcome that went to Muttaqi’s head, or it was a diplomatic carte blanche by the Indian government, the visit did end up becoming truly “historic”, by the visitor’s decision to import “Kabul Rules” to Delhi, and by what followed thereafter.
So, what are these rules? The short answer: women shall be neither seen nor heard. Afghanistan is the only country in the world today where the government bans women from education and work. The restrictions on their mobility have limited their access to food and health care. For this reason, Afghanistan is a humanitarian disaster unfolding in slow motion. It is why the Taliban has not been recognised by the international community despite its eagerness to engage with the regime.
A million challenges face Indian women, and they confront them daily. But what they do have guaranteed to them by the Indian Constitution, are equal rights. And no, they have never been kept out of a press conference before on account of their gender. Muttaqi’s belief he could take the liberty of calling an invited audience of only male journalists to a press conference at the Afghan Embassy was misplaced, if not downright entitled. The backlash from Indian women journalists was fast, furious, and well deserved.Muttaqi’s decision to pedal back, and hold another press conference at the same venue, this time inviting women journalists, made the fight well worth it, and his visit doubly historic. It may be that the Modi government, facing flak from even its own constituencies for permitting the Taliban to do as they please in this country, advised the course correction. Regardless, for the first ever time, the Taliban was forced to yield on their anti-women ideology, albeit on foreign soil.
This is no small victory. It was snatched from the jaws of men who deploy cultural and religious exceptionalism to keep women in oppression and attack critics for “weaponising” the issue. This win is not just for and by Indian women journalists, but is also in solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, who have watched the world make nice with the Taliban, making only pro forma noises about the unimaginably horrific plight of women in that country.
New Delhi’s Moral Surrender
The Modi government’s blasé attitude -washing its hands off the exclusion of women at the initial press interaction by saying it had no involvement in it-reeked of no less than another surrender to the Taliban, the second one, 25 years after Indians saw their government abjectly give in to its demands, made on behalf of its patrons in Pakistan, in return for the lives of the hostages on IC-814.
Let alone the government’s laughably lame excuse that it had no control over the media programme of its VIP guest, the Modi government betrayed its own slogans hailing “Nari Shakti” and “Beti Padhao Beti Bachao”. It also lost the opportunity to officially send a message to the Taliban that not only is such conduct unacceptable in India, but it is morally and in every other way reprehensible in Afghanistan too.Delhi could have used the occasion to signal to Afghan women that it understands their plight and is willing to speak up for them, even if indirectly. Instead, in the bad publicity that followed, the Modi government that takes pride in telling the world that all is well with India’s democratic credentials, ended with egg on its face.
When finally they got the opportunity to come face to face with Muttaqi, the Indian women journalists also wrung out from the Taliban official a half expression of regret for the killing of Reuters photojournalist and Indian national Danish Siddiqui, who was captured, tortured and killed as he covered the Taliban advance. This was a matter that the government should have taken up but did not.
Somewhere, India’s foreign policy and national security bro-clubs seem to have lost sight of the fact that the Taliban need India more than the other way around, that the government need not bend over backward to keep the mullahs engaged.
What does India’s foreign policy stand for today is a question that the glib phrase “strategic autonomy” does not quite answer. In an unexpected way, the Taliban visit served to remind that strategic autonomy is nothing without a measure of moral clarity in the quicksand of geopolitical manoeuvres.