Cosying up to Taliban: The India way

Ikramuddin Kamil studied in India just as many youngsters from Afghanistan did. He earned his doctorate from South Asia University in New Delhi on a scholarship from the government of India. He recently made news when the so-called government run by the Taliban in Kabul appointed him as the ‘acting consul’ of Afghanistan in Mumbai, the financial capital of India.

Kamil’s was the first diplomatic appointment by the Taliban in India and New Delhi accepted it. So, did it signal that India was now ready to consider recognising the government that the Taliban established after returning to power in Afghanistan in August 2021? Not yet perhaps, but New Delhi’s nod to the first official appointment by the Taliban came after a series of engagements between its diplomats and the Sunni Islamist organisation’s leaders over the past three years.

Gone are the days when India strongly opposed the US policy of drawing a line between the “good Talibans” and the “bad Talibans” and engaging with the “good ones”. New Delhi started shedding its inhibitions as Washington DC went ahead with its negotiations with the Taliban, culminating with the February 29, 2020, deal, which would lead to the withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan by next year.

Just a fortnight after the radical militant organisation’s gun-toting fighters stormed into Kabul on August 15, 2021, New Delhi’s then envoy to Doha, Deepak Mittal, had a meeting with Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, the head of the Taliban’s political office in the capital of Qatar. It was New Delhi’s second publicly acknowledged engagement with the Taliban. The first one had taken place in December 1999, when then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh had a meeting with the Taliban government’s Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil in Kandahar and handed over to him three terrorists to secure the release of the crew and the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814.

Unlike in 1996, New Delhi did not formally shut down its embassy in Kabul after the return of the Taliban to power after two decades. It evacuated its envoy and other diplomats from Afghanistan in August 2021 but sent back a “technical team” less than a year later to run its mission in Kabul and coordinate the delivery of humanitarian aid – food and medicines – from India.

New Delhi had several rounds of engagements with the leaders of the Taliban in the past two years, the latest being the meeting between a senior diplomat of India and Afghanistan’s “acting defence minister”, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of militia’s late founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, on November 6.

India’s outreach to the Taliban is apparently aimed at stopping its strategic rivals Pakistan and China from turning the Sunni Islamist group’s return to power in Afghanistan into an advantage. The relations between Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, however, turned sour over the past two years. Islamabad blamed the Taliban regime in Kabul for the spurt in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Farid Mamundzay, who was appointed as Kabul’s envoy to New Delhi by the erstwhile government of Ashraf Ghani, announced the closure of the Embassy of Afghanistan in India’s capital in November 2023, alleging “persistent challenges” from the host government. New Delhi then quietly let two Afghan diplomats, who were in the good book of the Taliban – take over the embassy.

New Delhi also cautiously avoided lending its voice to the clamour of criticism on the Taliban’s abysmal human rights records and its denial of access to education for a large section of the women of Afghanistan.

“India has age-old ties with the people of Afghanistan and cannot afford to be absent from this strategic space indefinitely,” Sharat Sabharwal, New Delhi’s former envoy to Islamabad, told DH. “India has done well in engaging with the Taliban, Afghanistan’s de-facto rulers, both in the interest of its own security and to provide humanitarian assistance. All other major countries are acting likewise for the same reasons.”