A mix of factors have influenced India’s decision to openly engage with the Taliban four years after the group took over Afghanistan.
The Indian government reportedly had backchannel communication with the Taliban for some time. But it was only in October that the Taliban’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited New Delhi, where he held, not one, but two news conferences. The first omitted to include women journalists.
India soon announced it would reopen its embassy in Kabul, downgraded to a technical office after the US troops left Afghanistan in 2021. The embassy of India in Kabul will augment India’s contribution to Afghanistan’s comprehensive development, humanitarian assistance, and capacity-building initiatives, in keeping with the priorities and aspirations of Afghan society, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on October 21.
During Muttaqi’s visit, an Indian-Taliban statement said both condemn “all acts of terrorism emanating from regional countries”. The Pakistan government criticised the joint statement. Violence had also broken out along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, killing dozens, when Muttaqi, who is on the United Nations sanctions’ list (and given a travel waiver), was in India.
Not talking to the Taliban is no longer an option for India. The US is increasingly engaging with Pakistan, which has deep ties to China. Within weeks of taking over the internationally recognised Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2021, senior Taliban officials were hosted to meetings in Beijing.
Bilal Karimi is the Taliban’s ambassador to China since last year. India and Afghanistan established diplomatic relations in 1950. But like most other countries, India does not recognise the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call it, today. “This is India’s calibrated step-by-step move. It is still short of recognition,” Jayant Prasad, India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, said, adding that India need not consider recognising the Taliban officially, because “we are not in a race with Pakistan and China”. But if India is not involved, then “China would have a free run”, Prasad said.
India-Afghanistan relations date back centuries. In modern times, cinema, cricket, and gemstones have connected the two countries. Although relations with the Taliban have been difficult. In the Afghan civil war from 1996 to 2001, the Indian government supported Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban. In 1999, the Taliban were suspected of supporting the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane that took off from Kathmandu for New Delhi, but stayed at Kandahar airport for a week, leading to a major hostage crisis. In 2008, the Indian embassy in Kabul was attacked in a suicide mission, in which many Indian nationals, including officials, were killed.
Scores of young Afghans have studied in Indian colleges and India, considered the largest regional donor, has built schools in
Afghanistan. India has constructed roads, such as one linking remote areas through which goods can move from Chabahar
port in Iran into Afghanistan. Chabahar is of strategic importance to India.
The Afghan side invited Indian companies to invest in the mining sector that would help strengthen bilateral trade and commercial relations, the MEA said in a statement on October 10 after the meeting between Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar and Muttaqi.
“We don’t want a hiatus in development by our absence in Afghanistan,” Prasad said. “India’s long-term objective is economic.”
India needs Afghanistan to access trade in Central Asia, as does China, which in addition has tried to stem out an insurgency in the region of Xinjiang that narrowly borders Afghanistan.
As part of the Taliban’s religious diplomacy, Muttaqi also visited the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in Uttar Pradesh. According to a recent paper published by the New Delhi based think-tank Observer Research Foundation, by publicly associating with the Deoband, the Taliban are seeking to re-establish themselves as “heirs to a scholarly Islamic reform
movement rather than as a militant regime”. The move’s geopolitical undertones include “an effort to assert independence from Pakistan’s ideological patronage”
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 "India takes a Taliban call")
