As India engages the Taliban government, Afghan women feel their loss

New Delhi: A young journalist, who must remain unnamed for her personal security, recently received an international award for trying to uphold human and women’s rights within Afghanistan. At considerable personal risk, she is part of a network of women who bring out the ZAN Times, an online newspaper which highlights the severe hardship women are forced to undergo just to survive in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country in August 2021.
The journalist, nurtured in the post-Taliban 1.0 era after 2001, managed to get her passport, which was still valid, and looked forward to a brief reprieve from the harsh conditions of her life outside Kabul. But she did not get a visa to come to India to receive the award, despite requests from the organisation giving the awards and, in disappointment, bitterly hit out at those in India who had nominated her for the award.
“We do not want charity, we just want a chance,” is what she told colleagues in India, much to their shame.
Increasingly, women have become faceless non-entities in that country, even though Taliban 2.0 was meant to be different. Cut off from avenues of education in schools and colleges and even from taking walks in the park or other open spaces, it is as though women do not exist there; one by one their avenues of communication have been cut off by a repressive, fundamentalist regime which fears that women meeting and communicating with each other could become a threat to them.
The Taliban regime began enforcing new draconian laws from mid-September, further cutting women’s links with the world outside their homes. This new religious edict bans women from raising their voices, from reciting the Quran in public and from looking at men other than their husbands or relatives. It requires women to cover the lower half of their faces in addition to wearing a cover on their heads which they were already expected to wear, among other rules.
Despairing Afghan women, who feel the world has abandoned them, say that whatever hopes they once harboured for easing the severe restrictions on them have largely vanished.

Women’s lives have been severely regulated since the Taliban-run government assumed power, even before the latest rules came into effect mid-September. These new laws now codify the restrictions that were imposed on women in practice and indicate that the restrictions will be rigorously implemented even in urban areas, where rules had been less rigorously enforced.
Declining to publicly denounce these restrictions on half the Afghan population, India has slowly been increasing its official engagement with the Taliban government.
Earlier this month, an Indian delegation met Afghanistan’s acting Defence Minister Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, to offer them the use of Chabahar Port in Iran to encourage business in his country. The delegation, led by J P Singh, the Joint Secretary of the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran division in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), also discussed extending humanitarian assistance to Kabul. There are unconfirmed reports that the Taliban government has established a trade/business office in Mumbai to revive business in the dismally poor country.
India does not officially recognise the Taliban regime, which has been synonymous with terrorism and misogynist fundamentalism, that has been ruling Afghanistan since August 2021, but has been engaging with them to provide humanitarian aid, including wheat, medicines and medical supplies, to the Afghan people.

At a recent media briefing, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the delegation had also met Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other senior ministers, along with the heads of UN agencies.

“They had discussions on India’s humanitarian assistance, also how the Chabahar Port can be utilised by the business community in Afghanistan for transactions and for export and import and any other thing that they would like to do,” Jaiswal said.

The Afghan economy has been ravaged by the stoppage of almost all international aid and because inept attempts by the Taliban to revive any semblance of economic activity has not worked. This has been primarily because the entire international community has chosen to not deal with them after they reneged on their word to uphold basic human rights and grant some opportunities to women to study and work.

Despite the women being taken out of the picture, it appears that India, which reopened its mission in Kabul after devastating floods ravaged Afghanistan in 2022, feels that it cannot wait any longer and will lose out to others in the neighbourhood if it does not refurbish its presence in that country.

Officials said that the lack of an official presence in Afghanistan had hampered Indian efforts to provide assistance to the Afghan people, facing an acute humanitarian crisis, with limited access to basic food and funds, but they are not considering granting any diplomatic recognition to the Taliban regime.
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