Women in the front row- setting precedent for future India-Taliban engagements

mangaloretoday.com/DH news

New Delhi, Octpber 12, 2025: On October 12, journalists, men and women, walked into the Afghanistan embassy in New Delhi, which looked ghost-like over the last couple of years. The globally recognised flag of the democratically elected government,overthrown violently on August 15, 2021, still fluttered in the wind outside.

The press interaction that followed marked a major climb down for the Taliban — one for the history books. Within 48 hours, Taliban Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi was forced to address a second press conference — this time with women journalists seated on the front row along with their male colleagues.

Barring the exception of two, none of the women were in headscarves. A volley of hard-hitting questions about the rights of young girls and women of Afghanistan to be educated and be a part of the workforce was asked. A scale and tone of questions at a press event that no Taliban leader has faced in the past four years of controlling power.

It was very unlike the October 10 presser, where Muttaqi addressed a select men-only club, with women counterparts excluded, and barely one or two questions were asked about Afghan women’s rights. The exclusion of women journalists led to a huge furore and political storm. Ironically, the Taliban does give interviews to foreign women journalists in Kabul.

Asked about the exclusion of women from his first press conference in India, Muttaqi called it "an inadvertent technical issue with a short list of journalists prepared in a short time". A statement as unconvincing as the note put out by the Ministry of External Affairs earlier that "it had no role to play" in the October 10 press conference which, in a first, brought gender discrimination to a press conference organised in India by a foreign delegation infamous for the gender apartheid it practices back home.

Are we to believe that a vertically split and hardly staffed embassy with  its Charge D’Affaires (CDA) Sayed Mohammed Ibhrahimkhil in New Delhi, aligned with the ousted Afghan government and a Taliban-appointed consul general in Mumbai did the ‘male only’ media selection process by themselves?

Even if that were the case, how could the Narendra Modi government be keen to simply wash its hands off the entire incident by bending to the discrimination against female journalists without raising objections? The same government enthusiastically projects Naari Shakti whether it is in India’s Right of Reply to Pakistan in the United Nations by a young woman diplomat or women officers of the armed forces briefing on Operation Sindoor.

The pro-government ecosystem that has suddenly discovered its love for a globally-sanctioned terror regime, citing ‘national security interests’, kept harping on the Vienna conventions to justify the discrimination against women, arguing that what happened in the Afghan embassy was beyond the control of the Indian government, as it was technically Afghan territory. But they chose to ignore the guiding principles of the convention that include respect for human rights and and freedoms, and stress on both international law and the law of the land to prevent abuse of diplomatic immunity.

The host countries can always request certain protocols or make their objections known to visiting delegations. Even Modi, who has not addressed a press conference in India since 2014, has taken questions from the press in Washington DC because the US administration insisted. Not to forget, the Taliban is yet to be officially recognised.