Neither New Delhi nor its allies across Afghanistan has happy memories of Taliban takeovers in Kabul. Kabul’s first experience of Taliban rule began in 1996, when Taliban vanguards, backed by the Pakistan army, stormed into Kabul after steadily fighting their way north from their southern strongholds around Kandahar. Consolidating their hold over Kabul, the Taliban’s leadership under Mullah Omar discovered that the United Nations (UN)-backed government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and First Vice President Ahmed Masood had already slipped out of the capital and retreated to their traditional fortress, the Panjsher Valley.
Searching for a target to vent their fury, the Taliban leadership zeroed in on former President Mohammed Najibullah, who had taken refuge with the U.N. in Kabul. Dragging Najibullah out of the U.N. compound, the vengeful Taliban tortured him to death and then hanged him from a lamp-post. For Kabul’s shocked citizenry, this was the introduction to the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan, as the Taliban called itself. For the next five years, from 1996 to 2001, Afghans across the country were governed in accordance with a strict, literalist version of Sunni Islam in which the final arbiter of right and wrong was the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and its interpretation of the Shariah, or Islamic law.
From 2021, when the Taliban reconquered Kabul, there has been a return to that nightmare period, with public lashings and executions, the banning of music and confinement of women largely to their residences.
Against this backdrop, last week saw a diplomatic earthquake that could reshape strategic and diplomatic alignments across South Asia. Afghanistan’s officiating foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, embarked on a week-long visit to India, during which he held direct meetings with India’s Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar. This was the first ministerial visit to India by a Taliban official.
Muttaqi’s visit to India has yielded several important outcomes. Following official talks on October 10, New Delhi has announced it would upgrade its “technical mission” in Kabul to a full embassy. With the Indian and Afghan governments now opening a dialogue track, there is a possibility of useful cooperation. Both sides have agreed to deepen cooperation on development projects, particularly in healthcare, public infrastructure, and capacity-building. Jaishankar handed over five ambulances to the Afghan government as a gesture of goodwill. This high-level engagement by New Delhi reflects a pragmatic shift in India’s Afghanistan policy, with a more liberal twist in the functioning of the Taliban-controlled government.
India has always reacted conservatively to the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul. New Delhi shut down its embassy in Kabul when the Taliban stormed into power in 1996; promptly re-opening it in 2001 when Northern Alliance ground forces, backed by United States air power, evicted the Taliban in 2001. India’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government shut down the embassy again when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, evacuating all but a small technical team that stayed back in Kabul to oversee Indian humanitarian relief efforts.
That New Delhi has been constrained to evacuate most of its embassy staff from a country where the public holds Indians in the highest esteem underscores the failure of India’s diplomatic policy in Afghanistan. For years, while the Taliban was in power in Kabul, the mandarins on Raisina Hill in New Delhi failed to reach out to the Taliban and build bridges for even a basic conversation.
Instead, New Delhi held firmly to the belief that the Taliban is a proxy for the Pakistani army and that its actions were controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The corollary is that negotiating with the Taliban is as fruitless as negotiating with the ISI would be.
As a consequence, New Delhi found itself for years without official levers or dialogue channels in a country where India and Indians are so respected that it is common to be accosted on the streets by locals and invited for a glass of tea.
But still, India’s security establishment treats the average Afghan with suspicion. In a long conversation I had with the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeff, in June 2011, he put to me the question: “Why does India not want to engage us in dialogue. We have been consistently sidelined by New Delhi, but we are still eager to forge a partnership with them. But New Delhi treats us like outcasts and refuses to engage us in dialogue.” When I told him that the Indian security establishment regards the Taliban as a Pakistani proxy, the proud old Afghan leader responded: “We are Pashtuns and we have no respect for the arrogant Punjabis who rule Pakistan. When we (the Taliban) take important decisions, we take them in our national and our tribal interest. We may be conservative Muslims, but we are Afghan nationalists, not Pakistani puppets.”
The Taliban leader ended our conversation with this piece of logic. “You can travel anywhere in Afghanistan and you will find that everyone – whether Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras or Pashtuns – loves India and all Indians. Do you think the Taliban can go against this wave of popular opinion?”
It is these mindsets that New Delhi and Kabul will bring to the table if the Ministry of External Affairs engages the Taliban in the days, months and years ahead.
New Delhi has made it clear that its decision to deepen engagement with Kabul is driven by geopolitical realities and security concerns, and it does not constitute a formal recognition of the Taliban government. India’s strategy will be keen to address security risks and extract assurances that Afghan soil will not be used for anti-India activities by terror groups.
Holding a dialogue with the Taliban has never been easy. Several contacts early in 2025 were necessary to set up the ministerial visit in October. In January 2025, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met with Muttaqi in Dubai. This was the highest-level contact between the two sides since 2021. In May 2025, Foreign Minister Jaishankar held a phone conversation with Muttaqi after the Taliban government condemned the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, India.
It would appear that, willy-nilly, New Delhi would have to engage with the Taliban regime, especially since India’s traditional partners, the Northern Alliance, are fading away. Meanwhile, the Taliban has demonstrated that it has the military forces needed to control Afghanistan. Billions of dollars of weaponry that the U.S. and its partners equipped the Afghan National Army with, having fallen into Taliban hands, has made the regime even stronger.
With the common Afghan tired of endless fighting, negotiations and the activation of diplomatic channels are likely to yield better results than a simmering, endless hostility.