Opinion Shashi Tharoor writes: India’s Taliban outreach requires reconciling principle with pragmatism
Engagement does not require moral whitewashing, but it does require constant public scrutiny and clear red lines. Hard task for New Delhi is to protect both national security and the dignity of the rights-bearing citizenry our government represents
India’s own history of principled foreign policy choices sharpens many Indians’ misgivings about the current debate. In the 1970s, India objected vehemently to apartheid South Africa — including forfeiting a Davis Cup final in 1974 rather than accept sporting ties with a regime that institutionalised racial oppression. (C R Sasikumar) 
Foreign policy habitually lives in the uneasy space between moral conviction and hard-nosed calculation. States declaim universal values and, when expediency dictates, recalibrate. India’s recent outreach to Afghanistan’s Taliban-led authorities —most visibly the recent visit this month by Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister — provides a vivid case study of that tension. New Delhi’s meetings, the joint statement and promises of humanitarian and development cooperation, reveal a strategic logic; the press-room controversy over the exclusion of women journalists lays awkwardly bare the moral compromises that accompany realpolitik.
India’s rationale for engaging the Taliban is threefold and plainly pragmatic. First, Kabul matters to New Delhi’s security calculus: A stable Afghanistan that refuses to harbour, let alone unleash, anti-India militants is a strategic imperative, especially given the legacy of cross-border terrorism and the country’s historical and geographic proximity to Pakistan. Second, India has long-standing development footprints and people-to-people ties with Afghanistan, which was for years the largest recipient of our development assistance ($2.3 billion); keeping aid, infrastructure and consular channels open protects those investments and influence. Third, India’s engagement is a hedging strategy in a region where geopolitical rivalry is intensifying. Failure to keep channels open with Kabul would only cede space to Pakistan, China and others to deepen ties, undermine India’s interests and shape outcomes to their advantage.
Those considerations explain why New Delhi hosted Amir Khan Muttaqi, allowed him the use of the Afghan Embassy, negotiated logistics for upgraded consular facilities and reaffirmed humanitarian commitments — steps announced publicly in a joint statement after the meetings. Formal recognition did not follow, but our “technical mission” in Kabul was upgraded to an “embassy”. The distinction matters; it signalled both engagement and caution.
The visit’s optics were complicated by a diplomatic faux pas by the Afghans: A Taliban-organised press interaction in New Delhi excluded women journalists, prompting sharp domestic criticism and a government statement distancing itself from the episode. Indian newsrooms, Opposition politicians and media strongly protested what they termed an unacceptable importation of misogyny onto Indian soil. The Ministry of External Affairs insisted it had no role in arranging that particular media event, while subsequently the Taliban leader addressed women journalists exclusively at another presser after the uproar. The press-conference controversy left a sour taste in Indian mouths, and raised anew the moral misgivings surrounding New Delhi’s engagement with the Taliban regime.
This episode is a concentrated lesson. Engagement can yield access and concessions— assurances about non-use of Afghan territory by anti-India groups were publicly reiterated — but it can also force domestic audiences to confront the dissonance between India’s constitutional commitments to gender equality and its willingness to accommodate a movement that systematically curtails women’s fundamental rights.
India’s present outreach cannot be understood without recalling the fraught past. The first Taliban regime’s complicity in Pakistani hostility to India — most starkly during the December 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 to Kandahar — left deep scars when negotiations led to the release of jailed Pakistani terrorists and the flight’s harrowing denouement. That episode hardened New Delhi’s stance for years and underpinned unequivocal non-recognition of, and non-cooperation with, the Taliban for the subsequent quarter-century.
What has changed since then is geopolitical context, the Taliban’s attempt to claim a measure of diplomatic normalcy, its increasing estrangement from its erstwhile sponsors and patrons in Pakistan (together with border clashes between the two countries), and India’s own strategic imperatives. The US withdrawal in 2021, the reconfiguration of regional alignments, and Afghanistan’s dependence on external aid have created incentives to reopen channels. New Delhi calculates that quiet diplomacy, humanitarian engagement and selective cooperation on counterterrorism and connectivity can better secure Indian interests than isolation alone.
India’s own history of principled foreign policy choices sharpens many Indians’ misgivings about the current debate. In the 1970s, India objected vehemently to apartheid South Africa — including forfeiting a Davis Cup final in 1974 rather than accept sporting ties with a regime that institutionalised racial oppression. That sacrifice was a moral stand that dramatically reinforced India’s anti-colonial and anti-racist identity on the world stage. Contrast this with the same India’s willingness to co-operate with an Afghan government that treats women as abominably as South Africa treated Black people. Why is gender discrimination any more acceptable than racial discrimination? Shouldn’t India have taken a comparable moral line — or is gender-based repression somehow more acceptable today than racial discrimination was yesterday?
The answer is partly about leverage and partly about perceived urgency. Apartheid South Africa presented a clear moral axis and a definable case for international isolation that dovetailed with India’s global posture leading the campaign against it. Afghanistan today is messy: Humanitarian catastrophe, security vacuum, and fragile statehood complicate the calculus. But expediency alone cannot erase the ethical question: If India once refused to dignify racialised oppression, why do we tolerate, even temporarily, a regime that curtails half its population’s basic freedoms?
How should thinking Indians react to this dilemma? Civic unease is palpable, legitimate and necessary. Engagement does not require moral whitewashing, but it does require constant public scrutiny and clear red lines. Thoughtful Indian democrats should insist on three demands simultaneously: First, that humanitarian and development assistance be channelled in ways that prioritise women’s needs and protect their access to education and health; second, that diplomatic contact be conditional, calibrated and reversible — no automatic recognition and no shameful moral compromises; third, that domestic ritual prestige not be ceded to foreign actors who flout India’s constitutional values on gender equality.
India’s diplomatic posture can be both realistic and moral if it embeds accountability mechanisms — transparent aid-monitoring, specific benchmarks on rights-resumption, and public reporting on security assurances. Civil society, media and Opposition politics have a role in pressing the government to make those conditions explicit rather than implicit.
The Taliban episode is a study in the contradictions of contemporary diplomacy — the need to secure tangible national interests colliding with the moral standards and expectations of a pluralistic democracy. History’s reminders should inform, but not dictate nor be erased by, our current choices. Engagement without ethical guardrails risks normalising repression; isolation without pragmatic engagement risks strategic setbacks.
The hard task for New Delhi is to reconcile principle with pragmatism in ways that protect both national security and the dignity of the rights-bearing citizenry our government represents. As the land of Mahatma Gandhi, who taught us that noble ends do not ever justify ignoble means, India must remain true to itself. And we, the public, must not cease to be vigilant about what is said and done in our name.
The writer, a former UN Under Secretary-General and former Minister of State for External Affairs, chairs the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs
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