Opinion When a Taliban ‘minister’ is celebrated in Deoband, it sends a chilling message

A reminder: The Taliban are the de facto authority in Kabul, but not a democratically elected, internationally recognised government. India has said repeatedly that it has not recognised the regime; yet, during the Taliban minister’s visit, Indian officials and some media outlets kept referring to Muttaqi as “Afghanistan’s foreign minister.” In the world of diplomacy, words are important and shape policy. Language that casually confers the mantle of legitimacy contradicts India’s own position of engagement without recognition.

After announcing the reopening of the Indian embassy in Kabul, the highlight of Muttaqi’s first day in New Delhi was women journalists not getting permission to cover his press conference. The backlash from Indian reporters and Opposition leaders was immediate; the Indian government’s reply was that it “had no involvement in the press interaction” and was thus beyond its control. After much criticism, Muttaqi held another press conference, this time with women present, during which he was confronted about women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The Indian government’s response was legally correct. Under Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, mission premises are inviolable and agents of the receiving state may not enter without consent. India can’t police an embassy room, but it can shape the context in which that room is used and what follows when it is abused.

The Indian government must now summon the acting Taliban envoy in New Delhi and issue a formal warning to make it clear that discriminatory access for accredited media violates India’s expectations for any official engagement on Indian soil. It should also announce publicly that any future press events involving Taliban representatives must guarantee equal access for women journalists. That is the only way to say to the representative of the world’s most misogynistic regime that India’s capital is not a stage for misogyny, even within embassy premises.

Perhaps Muttaqi’s second day was the most shocking. The Deobandi movement and its hardline branches have long supplied the textual justifications and social pipelines for extremist projects across our region. Almost all Taliban commanders studied in Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan; some of the most lethal networks, including leaders of the Haqqani Network, were established and grown at Darul Uloom Haqqania — nicknamed, without irony, the “University of Jihad.”

Along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, the 1980s war against the Soviet Union supercharged the Deobandi network. Pakistan’s military regime under General Zia-ul-Haq saw the Islamisation as a successful way to achieve “strategic depth” and backed chosen militant groups across the area. With money flowing in from the CIA and Saudi Arabia through Pakistan ISI channels, Deobandi madrasas became unstoppable. Madrasa curricula hardened, recruitment and indoctrination blended into “charity,” and a generation learned that modern states were alien and non-Islamic, and so they should be torn down. Many future Taliban leaders were products of these schools or their ecosystem, which normalised the idea that governance could be seized by force.

This is why the scenes at Darul Uloom Deoband are quite worrying. The enthusiastic welcome for Muttaqi was not simply a cultural nostalgia as Muttaqi suggested at his press conference, or Afghan-Indian “civilisational” talk. For hardline Deobandi followers, the Taliban’s success in toppling an elected government in 2021 is proof of concept, a living example that shows how ideological resolve and violence can crush pluralism and women’s rights, while still extracting international engagement next door. They see the Taliban as role models, not outliers. That romanticism is fuel for future misadventures in India and elsewhere.

In India, too many have died in attacks by Pakistan-backed terror groups whose intellectual DNA overlaps with the Deobandi spectrum. Islamabad’s security establishment did not incubate these networks in a vacuum; the madrasa-militant complex was built for strategic aims. When India edges closer to the Taliban, understandably for its national interests, it must do so with its eyes and ears open. Engagement without clarity becomes encouragement, and in the case of the Taliban, it’s legitimising violence. The signal to extremists here is simple: Win by force, hold territory, and the world will come around. That’s a dangerous lesson to broadcast in a country still targeted by cross-border terror.

The writer is a journalist and human rights advocate from Afghanistan, based in London