India reaches out to first family of Taliban in Afghanistan

New Delhi: A senior diplomat of India has met Afghanistan’s “acting defence minister”, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of Taliban’s late founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, as well as the other leaders of the so-called government the Sunni Islamist organisation established after returning to power in the conflict-ravaged country in 2021.

J P Singh, joint secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi, has led a delegation of the Government of India to Kabul. He met Yakub on Wednesday and other senior ministers of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan. He also met the senior officials of the UN agencies and former Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

“They had discussions on India's humanitarian assistance, also how the Chabahar Port (in Iran) can be utilized by the business community in Afghanistan for transactions and for export and import and any other thing that they would like to do for,” Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson of the MEA, said in New Delhi.

Singh has been New Delhi’s key interlocutor for engagement with the Taliban ever since the Sunni Islamist militant outfit returned to power in Kabul in August 2021, taking advantage of the withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Afghanistan.

Though he earlier had meetings with Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and other functionaries of the Taliban’s so-called government in Afghanistan, his meeting with Yaqoob in Kabul on Wednesday was first with the son of Mullah Omar, who not only founded the Sunni Islamist militant organisation, but was also the ‘Emir’ of the country from 1996 till 2001.

“In this meeting, the two sides emphasised their common desire to expand bilateral relations, especially in the field of humanitarian cooperation and other issues and expressed their interest in strengthening further interactions between Afghanistan and India,” the Ministry of Defence of the administration run by the Taliban in Kabul stated.

India, like the US and most of the other nations, has not yet recognized the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan set up by the Taliban in September 2021. But its outreach to the Taliban is apparently aimed at stopping Pakistan and its “all-weather iron-brother” China from turning the Sunni Islamist group’s return to power in Afghanistan into a strategic advantage against India.

New Delhi reached out to the first family of the Taliban in Kabul on Wednesday even as the relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan hit a new low over the past few months. Islamabad has been accusing the Taliban government in Kabul of providing sanctuaries to the terrorists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s border security forces claimed to have killed five TTP terrorists when they were crossing over from Afghanistan.

Though Pakistan saw the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 as an opportunity for it to gain a strategic edge against India in the region, the relations between Islamabad and Kabul turned sour over the past three years.

New Delhi had shut down the Embassy of India in Kabul when the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan in 1996. But after the Sunni Islamist militia had returned to power in Kabul on August 15, 2021, New Delhi had evacuated its envoy and diplomats from Afghanistan but had not formally shut down its embassy in Kabul and thus avoided severing diplomatic relations between the two nations.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had instead sought to build upon its back-channel contacts over the previous years with a section of the leadership of the Taliban. Stanekzai, who then headed the Taliban’s political office in Doha, had met Deepak Mittal, New Delhi’s envoy in the capital of Qatar, on August 31, 2021.

Less than a year after its first public engagement with the militia, New Delhi in June 2022 sent a delegation led by a senior diplomat for a meeting with the foreign minister of the Taliban’s government in the capital of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, India had also started sending foodgrains and other essentials for the starving people of Afghanistan. A “technical team” had been deployed in New Delhi’s diplomatic mission in Kabul soon to “closely monitor and coordinate the efforts of various stakeholders for the effective delivery of India’s humanitarian assistance to the people” of Afghanistan.

“Providing humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan is an important part of our assistance program and, so far in the last few months, and few years, we have dispatched several shipments of humanitarian assistance,” Jaiswal, the MEA spokesperson said, adding” We have longstanding ties with the people of Afghanistan, and these ties will continue to guide our approach towards the country”.