On Sunday, I woke up to the defiant presence of Indian women journalists confronting the Taliban foreign minister with head-on questions. “What are you doing, sir, in Afghanistan?” a woman journalist asked Amir Khan Muttaqi. “When will Afghan women and girls be allowed to go back and get their right to education?” Muttaqi smiled and said women’s education was not “haram”. But he offered no explanation for why, for four years, Afghan women and girls have been banned from school, university and most jobs.
That Sunday event was the second press conference the Taliban had held in New Delhi in two days. The first had invited only 16 male journalists. Women journalists were left off the list. After outrage, the Afghan embassy dismissed the exclusion as a “technical issue”, stating it had no press officer and didn’t know how to reach everyone. Somehow, they managed to reach only the men.
Anyone familiar with the Taliban’s record knows this was not an oversight. Excluding women has been the defining feature of Taliban rule. In their first week in power, they banned women from working in most public sectors; only those who could not be replaced by men were allowed to remain. Within a month, they barred teenage girls from secondary school. Soon after, women were forbidden from travelling alone — even to visit a clinic. They are now banned from public parks, gyms, and protests; their very voices are policed.
The Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice law, approved by their leader in August 2024, formally declares women’s voices forbidden. Within four months of their takeover, Reporters Without Borders found that four out of every five women journalists in Afghanistan had lost their jobs. Those who remain face threats, harassment, unpaid work, and censorship. In at least 19 provinces, no woman journalist is officially working.
A 2025 report by the Afghanistan Media Support Organisation (AMSO), which surveyed 100 female journalists, shows that only 7 per cent of Afghan women journalists can still work openly, while 33 per cent work in secret and 42 per cent have left journalism entirely. More than two-thirds report censorship or intimidation. The report calls this “a system of overlapping barriers that increase risk and silence”.
The timing of the Taliban delegation’s visit to India could not have been more striking. From October 8 to 10, the People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan convened in Madrid, where 24 Afghan women testified before a panel of international judges. Their testimonies were searing indictments of Taliban rule. The judges acknowledged in their preliminary findings that the Taliban’s treatment of women amounts to gender persecution, a crime against humanity.
One of the Tribunal’s central demands was explicit: Do not recognise or normalise the Taliban. Yet, even as Afghan women were pleading to be heard in Madrid, India was hosting the Taliban delegation for a week-long visit, meeting officials, speaking with the media, rubbing salt in the wounds of Afghan women and people.
Among those who testified in Madrid was a former Afghan television producer. She described how, after the Taliban’s return, women were first dismissed from newsrooms under the pretext of “budget cuts”, then slowly erased from the media landscape.
When she and other women journalists tried to hold a press conference to protest their exclusion, Taliban forces raided the venue before it began. “They cursed us, saying we made them look like demons to the world. They locked us in a room and threatened us with prison if we spoke again,” she told the Tribunal. That night, she did not return home. Taliban forces raided her house, beating her husband and son while searching for her. “Today I speak with a mask on, yet I am still afraid,” she said. “Women are not allowed to speak. They tell us, ‘Don’t raise your voice, it’s forbidden; cover your face.’ Girls are taken by force and disappeared, while people remain silent out of fear. Please, carry our voices to anyone who has the power to hear us.”
Her plea must be heard in India because when a democracy like India welcomes the Taliban as political interlocutors, it sends a chilling message: That the systematic erasure of women can be tolerated for strategic convenience, that women’s rights are expendable, a collateral cost of diplomacy.
As an Afghan woman journalist, I want to warn you what this message means. When the Indian government receives the Taliban without publicly challenging their record on women’s rights, it crosses the line from diplomacy into complicity. It lends legitimacy to a regime built on the exclusion of women and becomes a partner in the normalisation of their misogyny.
For the Taliban, the deliberate erasure of women’s visibility, voices, and livelihoods is not merely domestic policy; it is an ideology they are determined to export. In their worldview, a woman’s place begins and ends within her reproductive and household roles. They do not recognise women as social or political actors. They might be forced, as in the New Delhi press conference, to sit in a room with women, but they will never see women as equals. Certainly not Afghan women. If allowed, they would be eager to become ambassadors of misogyny, spreading their doctrine of gender apartheid beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
Like the women journalists in New Delhi whose defiance forced the Taliban to invite them back into the room, women everywhere must take a stand: There can be no normalisation of a regime that erases women. Because women’s rights in Afghanistan are not separate from women’s rights elsewhere, we are part of the same global struggle. Democracies like India must align their foreign policy with their own professed commitment to gender equality.
The Taliban’s silencing of women is not only about control; it is about rewriting history, inventing narratives that justify the subjugation of women in the name of culture and faith. Yet Afghan women have refused to vanish. They have continued to speak, to teach, to report, and to fight, often at immense personal risk.
That is why the testimonies in Madrid matter; they are a living record of what the Taliban have done and continue to do. That is why the confrontation in New Delhi matters because it revealed who stands on the side of humanity, who refuses to look away. And that is why solidarity must move beyond sympathy into action, demanding that women be present, visible, and heard in every forum where Afghanistan’s future is discussed.
The world cannot claim to stand for women’s rights while shaking hands with those who silence them. The first step toward justice for Afghan women is refusing to make their oppressors respectable or their erasure normal.
The writer, based in Canada, is editor-in-chief of Zan Times, which covers human rights in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
