What Afghan women want

“Do you keep the karwa chauth fast?” Make no mistake, that’s a googly, not a question, that has been asked of North Indian women over the years. Not just because you’re damned if you do (by feminists looking askance), or damned if you don’t (by the growing Sanskritisation of Middle India, which believes there’s only one answer to any riddle wrapped in an enigma), but because the question itself is a pigeonhole. Better not to answer it. Better to read the book that Ruhi Tewari has just written, called, What Women Want.

Ms Tewari’s book is about “understanding the female voter” in India, but the question is a larger one. If you have the imagination, you can broaden the canvas and ask it elsewhere too, including in neighbouring Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime carries out the most repressive actions against its own women.

In fact, the news from Delhi is that the Taliban Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who is on a six-day visit to India, during which time he will visit the Taj Mahal, the monument to love, as well as the Deoband seminary, refused to invite any Indian women journalists to his press conference in the capital on Friday.

Perhaps Muttaqi was worried what people would say back home if he was seen mingling with Indian women. And even though the press conference was held in the Afghan embassy, technically Afghan soil, the Taliban leader lost a huge opportunity to signal to half his population back home, why the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan should be given another half chance to emerge from the Dark Ages.

The Indian women journalists may have asked Muttaqi the question to which he doesn’t have an answer : What is it that Afghan women want? And if all they want is only half the sky, why don’t the mullahs in Kandahar give it to them?

Except, the answers are all there, if you really want to see them. This reporter was in Kabul on the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, in August 2022, and went into the ICU of the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital to see how women nurses and doctors dealt with the toughest cases. The ICU was clean and sanitised. The women doctors and nurses wore a uniform but no face covering. They were there to save lives, especially that of struggling neonates, not because they were women but because they had a skill, an expertise and a commitment to do so.

In Delhi, certainly, both India and the Afghan regime will want to downplay this avoidable kerfuffle over the exclusion of women journalists and urge everyone to look at the big picture — which is, that India has gone back on its own reservations about the Taliban and will now upgrade its mission in Kabul to a full-fledged embassy. This is truly a big step not just in India’s neighbourhood policy, but also signals a welcome return to pragmatism.

The sad part is that it took the Indian government about a decade to realise its own mistakes in the Afghan theatre. New Delhi was so heavily influenced by the Americans, especially by the Afghan-origin former US ambassador in Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad, that it forgot it was a heavyweight in the region. The US should have depended on India’s historical perspective and current analysis, not the other way round.

India should have played a role in the distribution of power in the Kabul landscape — at first help sort out the power struggle between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah; then when the Americans were parachuting Ashraf Ghani into Kabul, told them it was a terrible idea; once he was inserted, Delhi could have helped build a coalition against the emerging Taliban, even as it talked to the moderate Taliban to broker a deal between all sides.

Today, the story in Delhi is — look how smartly India has brought around the Taliban! But the tragedy is that the Taliban were ready to be brought around a really long time ago — talk to any Taliban or non-Taliban Afghan in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, male or female, Pashtun, Tajik or Hazara, and you will realise the incredible affection and regard Afghans have for Indians. Bollywood heroes and heroines, permanently on karva chauth and beyond, remain such a rage even today.

Never forget that the Taliban are also Afghan — Hamid Karzai reminds you about this fundamental truth each time you speak to him. The significant of this is that they will never really be in hock to the Arab. The question as to why Osama bin Laden left the mountains of Tora Bora to finally live within spitting distance of a Pakistan military establishment in Abbottabad, has its own answers.

The truth is that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has gone through convoluted hoops to arrive at this moment today — which is that Delhi and Kabul have a very special relationship that goes back centuries. Everyone else has always known that.

Here’s a second truth : India has seceded from its own neighbourhood and allowed other players to take precedence. China, Russia, the US and Pakistan, each of them are significant players in the Indian subcontinent — across all the nations that stretch from the Karakoram mountain ranges to Cox’s Bazaar on the Indian Ocean — and while they are welcome to play, India must return to its pre-eminent spot in this space.

The first step has been taken by hosting Amir Khan Muttaqi. The second must be to reopen India’s consulates in Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif — shut down under one pretext or another, mostly under US pressure and latterly, the fear of the Taliban takeover in 2021.

Perhaps the MEA should send a few of its amazing women diplomats to these consulates, just like it did in 2001 when Vijay Thakur Singh, the redoubtable diplomat on the Afghanistan-Pakistan desk, was sent to Kabul after the US bombed the Taliban into submission after the 9/11 attacks — along with Gautam Mukhopadhaya, Rudrendra Tandon and Vivek Katju, as India’s ambassador; Katju, now a columnist with The Tribune, was part of the team in December 1999 which negotiated with the Taliban on the Kandahar tarmac for a full week to send the passengers of IC-814 safely back home. Who says India doesn’t know the Taliban?

An Indian ambassador in Kabul is hardly a hardship posting. It’s like going home. That’s what Muttaqi should have told all the Indian male and female journalists he should have invited to his Delhi press conference on Friday — and patiently answered all their “what do women want” and all other questions.

Breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Amritsar-if-you-can’t-go-to-Lahore and dinner in Kabul? As Dr Manmohan Singh’s famous phrase resounds across the ether, you can imagine him having the last laugh somewhere.