Taliban Foreign Minister Muttaqi to go to India subsequent week

Four years after the Taliban took cost of Afghanistan in a violent motion, Amir Khan Muttaqi, the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Taliban administration, will journey to India subsequent week, officers of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) mentioned on Thursday (October 2, 2025). The go to is predicted to be targeted on developmental help to Afghanistan, which has been scuffling with shortage of important medicines and agricultural merchandise ever because the Taliban took over Kabul on August 15, 2021, the officers additional mentioned.

The go to has been into account for a while, and Mr. Muttaqi couldn’t journey earlier as India has been delicate to the truth that he, like a number of different Taliban leaders, continues to be positioned below worldwide sanctions due to the violent battle that the Taliban carried out in opposition to the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan beginning within the winter of 2001, the sources mentioned. 

A serious hurdle in normalising diplomatic relations with the Taliban has been the outfit’s rigid place on shutting entry to schooling and employment for the ladies of Afghanistan, and different human rights points, together with the remedy of prisoners. Indian officers indicated that the “non permanent exemption” that was issued by the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee on September 30 lastly firmed up the plans for Mr. Muttaqi’s India go to.

Mr. Muttaqi is predicted arrive right here on October 10, the sources mentioned.

India has not granted de jure (by proper) recognition to the Taliban regime in Kabul though Mr. Muttaqi has been assembly a lot of Indian officers over the previous years. In January, he met Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai. Mr. Misri was the highest-ranking Indian official to achieve out to the Taliban when the 2 sides mentioned methods to broaden cooperation by the Iranian port of Chabahar.

One of the problems that will come up throughout Mr. Muttaqi’s go to is more likely to be the continued use of the Chabahar port, particularly because the United States has ended the 2018 carve-out for India, which allowed New Delhi to make use of the strategically vital Iranian port regardless of the broad U.S. sanctions in opposition to Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that he desires the Bagram air base to revert to the U.S. forces, however the Taliban has rejected that concept.

The go to to New Delhi will likely be carefully watched throughout India’s neighbourhood in addition to past because it comes after Mr. Muttaqi hosted China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar in Kabul for the sixth China-Pakistan-Afghanistan Trilateral Dialogue on August 20. Earlier in May, Mr. Muttaqi had travelled to Bejing to take part within the fifth spherical of trilateral dialogue with Pakistan and China.

China has been urging the Taliban administration to make sure better Chinese entry to Afghan minerals, and has requested Kabul to be part of the expanded CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor).

India was one of many a number of international locations that evacuated their diplomats from the Afghan capital when the Taliban took cost in a army blitzkrieg on August 15, 2021. The evacuation course of, named Operation Devi Shakti, airlifted round 669 individuals from August to December 2021. A major variety of these evacuated had been a part of the minority Sikh and Hindu communities, and political activists of Afghanistan who got here below assault and confronted arson because the safety scenario took a downturn with varied teams competing for energy. On June 18, 2022, a terror assault was carried out by the ISIS on a gurdwara in Kabul, which claimed a number of lives, together with that of a number of Afghan safety personnel.

At the identical time, responding to the prevailing scenario on the bottom, India started sending humanitarian help, particularly medicines for ladies and kids, to the Indira Gandhi Child Health Hospital in Kabul, from December 2021. The consignments had been delivered to World Health Organization officers and the hospital authorities.  

Soon thereafter, India introduced that its “historic and civilisational relationship with the Afghan individuals” would proceed. The MEA introduced that “a technical staff” had been despatched to Kabul on June 23, 2022 to “carefully monitor and coordinate the efforts of varied stakeholders for humanitarian help and in continuation of our engagement with the Afghan individuals”.

The coverage of humanitarian help whereas sustaining an ambiguous diplomatic relation continued until most just lately, when India flew reduction supplies to Afghanistan after the August 31 earthquake within the japanese a part of the nation. Earlier, in November 2024, New Delhi confirmed better willingness to broaden engagement with the Taliban when it accepted a Taliban-approved nominee, Ikramuddin Kamil, for the publish of ‘Acting Consul General’ in Mumbai. The Taliban administration has diplomatic relations with a number of international locations, together with Pakistan, Russia, Iran, the UAE, Qatar, China, and the Central Asian states.