Taliban Minister Meets Indian Female Journalists in Delhi
In a diplomatic maneuver as carefully staged as it was politically fraught, the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, convened a separate meeting with a delegation of Indian female journalists in Delhi, a move that came only after his initial event pointedly excluded them. This gesture, ostensibly one of inclusion, must be viewed through the stark prism of the Taliban’s own record, a regime that has systematically dismantled the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, barring them from education beyond the sixth grade, from most forms of employment, and from public life itself.The very image of Muttaqi engaging with professional women in a foreign capital is a study in stark contradiction, a performance of moderation for an international audience while the reality on the ground in Kabul remains one of brutal gender apartheid. For the journalists in that room, the encounter was undoubtedly layered with profound tension; these are women who have built careers on the principle of a free press, now facing a representative of a government that has all but extinguished that concept for their Afghan sisters.The meeting raises urgent questions about the nature of India’s engagement with the de facto authorities in Afghanistan, a delicate balancing act between pragmatic regional diplomacy and the moral imperative to champion human rights. Is this a tentative step toward a new, more nuanced dialogue, or merely a cynical public relations ploy by the Taliban, designed to soften its image and encourage normalization without conceding an inch on its domestic policies? The personal impact on the leaders involved cannot be ignored; one must wonder about the internal calculus of an Indian government navigating this terrain, and the psychological toll on the Afghan women who watch from afar as their fate is discussed in rooms from which they are often absent.The historical parallel is chillingly clear: this is not the first time an authoritarian power has presented one face to the world while practicing another at home, and the international community’s record of holding such regimes accountable is, to put it mildly, chequered. The consequences of getting this wrong are immense, potentially legitimizing a system of gender-based oppression and setting a devastating precedent for how the world responds to the erosion of fundamental freedoms.A truly feminist foreign policy would demand that any engagement be conditional upon verifiable, tangible progress on women's rights, moving beyond symbolic gestures in foreign hotels to substantive change in Afghan schools, workplaces, and public spaces. Until then, such meetings remain a poignant, and perhaps painful, spectacle of what could be, set against the grim reality of what is.
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Chloe Bennett123k2 days ago
this feels like such a performative move tbh, like does anyone actually buy this
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