Open magazine, 17 January 2025
In early January, Vikram Misri, the foreign secretary of India, held a meeting with the Taleban’s Acting Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai, the most high-level meeting between India and representatives of the IEA. During the meeting, India agreed to extend both “humanitarian and developmental support” to the country. The Taleban urged India to liberalise the visa regime.
Other countries’ proactive engagement with Kabul has prompted New Delhi to step up its act, the authors write. “Attempting to understand the motivations behind India’s outreach to the Taliban-led IEA”, the authors offer two perspectives – on one hand, India’s biggest concern with respect to Afghanistan, preventing the (re)emergence of Afghanistan as a terrorist threat; on the other hand, “the status quo in the region warrants India’s outreach to the regime in Kabul to have some semblance of influence over the situation inside the country. (…) The fast-deteriorating relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan has also given New Delhi enough space to secure its interests. (…) Indian outreach is led by the prospect of isolating Pakistan in the region.”
India has tacitly accepted that the Afghan consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad subsequently got under Taleban control; the IRoA-era diplomats have also left the embassy in New Delhi. India may be close to restarting visas for Afghans, specifically in business, medical and student visas which had been suspended in the aftermath of the Taleban takeover in 2021 – but probably much more restricted than before 2021.
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This article was last updated on 20 Jan 2025
