From no to good Taliban-bad Taliban to love Taliban: India faces change
India was one of the handful of countries that resisted the idea of the good versus bad Taliban narrative and reiterated that the Taliban is a “sheer terrorist organisation”
When External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Afghanistan counterpart shook hands under the portal of New Delhi's Hyderabad House on 10 October, it was replete with ironies.
It shows how far India has travelled from the time when New Delhi, under a Congress-led UPA government headed by Manmohan Singh, had refused to embrace the Taliban, rejected the US view of distinguishing between "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban", and dubbed the entire hardline group as a "terror" group.
In 2010, a decade after the international forces led by the United States realised their campaign against terror in Afghanistan failed and the tide of domestic opinion was rising against the military campaign there, it began preaching the need for talking to the hard-nosed ideological outfit to get out of the mire in that country.
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As a logical corollary of that conclusion, the Americans put forward the theory of engaging with the "good Taliban" and fighting the "bad Taliban."
The revised view was that the solution to the Afghan problem must be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned. A fund of US$140 million was created at the London Conference in 2010 to win over the "good Taliban".
India was one of the handful of countries that resisted the idea of the good versus bad Taliban narrative and reiterated that the Taliban is a "sheer terrorist organisation."
The result of such principled posturing has a flip side in the vortex of international politics. India found itself squeezed out of the international discourse and initiatives.
Then came the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane (IC-814) from Kathmandu to Kandahar in 1998-99. The negotiations to save the lives of more than 200 passengers on board the plane and allowing some top jailed terrorists to go scot free, and above al,l the Taliban-Pakistan nexus hobbled New Delhi's strategy to deal with the Taliban.
Now, India seems to be ready to delink from the past.
This is a far cry from the time when India had no option other than shutting down its embassy in Kabul in 2021, soon after the Taliban takeover of that country by ousting the President Ashraf Ghani government and its predecessor, Hamid Karzai dispensation, both of which had robust relations with India.
How did the change in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government's Afghanistan policy come about?
The change has been on the cards for quite some time. Muttaqi's visit builds on a series of engagements between the two sides. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met Muttaqi in Dubai in January this year, and this was followed by phone calls between Muttaqi and Jaishankar, and India's special envoy to Afghanistan traveling to Kabul in April to discuss political and trade ties. But, an in-person meeting between the two foreign ministers, as Jaishankar said at the meeting with Muttaqi, "has a special value in allowing us to exchange perspectives, identify common interests and forge closer cooperation."
Above all, the Taliban regime's condemnation of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack was a key ingredient of the change.
The most substantive outcome of Muttaqi's visit was Jaishankar's announcement of rthe eopening of the Indian embassy in Kabul four years after it was closed and the Afghan Foreign Minister's readiness to depute diplomats to New Delhi. Muttaqi and Jaishankar made the right noises during their meeting. The Afghan Foreign Minister said his country would not allow any group "to use its territory against others", a statement viewed as addressing India's concerns over cross-border terrorism. He also said the Taliban had never "given a statement against India" amid the "many ups and downs witnessed during the American occupation of Afghanistan, and instead always sought good relations with close friend India."
Afghanistan should be pleased with Jaishankar's comment at the bilateral meeting that India was fully committed to the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of Afghanistan.
What strategic dividends does India look at from Muttaqi's visit, apart from signifying its intent to restore its presence in Afghanistan in development cooperation in key sectors like power, road, trade, health, and education, where it had pumped in at least three billion dollars during the tenure of Karzai and Ashraf Ghani?
A full formal diplomatic presence in Kabul will allow India to rebalance its interests against regional rivals Pakistan and China. Given the current sour relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, India would not like to lose time to fill the strategic space vacuum.
The visit signals the Taliban administration's bid to secure international recognition. For now, India has stopped short of formally recognising the Taliban government, even though Muttaqi's visit had most of the trappings of an important foreign ministerial event at the official level.
New Delhi is in no rush and would clearly like to wait and watch how the Taliban government cements its India policy in the time to come.
