Reports of the upgradation of India-Afghan relations as New Delhi seeks to boost its transactional engagement with the Taliban-ruled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) augur India’s sliding towards a formal recognition, thereby, legitimising the Taliban’s egregious violation of fundamental freedoms since it took control of the region.
It also signals India’s imprimatur of indifference to the gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Driving India’s abandonment of the moral agenda is its ascendancy of realpolitik, or to put it more succinctly: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are dangerously sliding towards war over the disputed Durrand line as transnational Taliban forces stoke Pashton irredentism and shatter Islamabad’s security framework anchored in the territory providing strategic depth vis a vis a perceived existential threat from India.
Pragmatism seemingly demands that India intensify engagement with whoever controls Afghanistan. Reinforcing this logic is India’s need to ensure the Taliban has a vested interest in preventing its territory from becoming a haven for global terrorist groups operating against India.
Also read: In a First, Indian Official Meets Acting Taliban Defence Minister of Afghanistan
Arguably, like the United States of America, India too believes that the Taliban is focused on establishing internal control within Afghanistan and that it should be bolstered in its competition against trans-national Islamist terrorist groups such as Daesh and Islamic State (Khorasan).
Influential politicians, including former Afghanistan VP Amrullah Saleh and US Congressman Tim Burchett, have decried the US’ funding of the Taliban, ostensibly in the name of humanitarian assistance.
However, as afg green, an Afghan opposition movement, details, the allocation of the $446,103,076 million that the Biden administration paid to the Taliban in 2024, under the rubric of Operation Enduring Sentinel, seemingly has no beneficiaries other than the Taliban itself.
In addition, there is also the claimed shipment of $40-80 million in cash to the Taliban-controlled Central Bank in Kabul every week or ten days.
The US and India also seem to be comfortable about the Taliban’s proliferation of madrassas which, according to its education minister, have enrolled 3.6 million students (boys and girls) at the more than 21,000 registered religious schools. This outnumbers the 18,000 public and private schools.
For Taliban, these religious schools are a means of entrenching social control and instilling their style of religious orthodoxy and misogyny. Especially in the multi ethnic provinces in northeastern Afghanistan where local power brokers still exist, the network of religious schools is designed to create a loyal Taliban cadre.
Also read: Women’s Groups in India, Pakistan Have a Role to Play in Afghanistan’s Reconstruction
But what about the complicating fears that teaching an extreme version of political Islam – reminiscent of the quami madrasa incubation of the early generation of Talibs in Pakistan – will do? Will it groom and prepare a new generation of jihadists and individuals who believe in Taliban values of rigidity, intolerance and tactics of violent coercion?
Dare one raise the argument about valuing soft power, have we already ceded the moral agenda to South Africa in the global south?
In 2021 India convened an emergency session on the Afghanistan situation and the Delhi Declaration voiced concerns about “ensuring the fundamental rights of women, children and minority communities”, albeit by the 2024 G20 Delhi Declaration, such concerns were squeezed out.
However, Afghanistan is an integral part of our increasingly troubled South Asian neighbourhood. What happens in Afghanistan, directly impacts the region. This includes the contagion effect of the suppression of fundamental freedoms, the pall of fear and anxiety that is shredding Afghanistan’s complex multi-ethnic, multi-regional social fabric, and more importantly, the misogyny that is stripping away the humanity of women in a static interpretation of Pashton patriarchal tradition of protection and honour – all legitimised through a gift-wrapped extreme version of Islam.
Globally, there is enough scholarship, as Diaz and Vahlji analyse, about the centrality of gender in fundamentalist religious movements and violent extremist ideologies, that is, the centrality of the subordination of women in both the ideology and tactics of many of the most active extremist groups.
Taliban’s conservatism
A USIP analysis picks out as the common thread in violent extremist groups – a strong patriarchal narrative that centres women’s role as part of both a critique of the existing corrupted social system symbolised by the propagation of (Western) progressive and equal rights of women and its replacement and return to once-moral societies. This has reached its apogee in Afghanistan under the first and second Taliban governments.
Ironically, during Afghanistan’s republican interregnum, the aggressive focus on Afghan women’s rights and empowerment in international development assistance (despite actual low proportional fund allocation) deepened Afghan men’s alienation and produced even more conservative and defensive positions on gender equality.
The ultra-conservative Taliban power elite, in its ideology and politics, made gender inequality central to the political mobilisation of narratives of tension between Afghanistan’s centre and periphery, urban and rural, tradition and modernity and local and foreign values.
As Pakistani scholar Nazish Brohi says, “Positioning women’s rights as one of the main threats to religion and religiosity remain crucial for these groups to rally public support”.
In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett had already flagged to the UN Human Rights Council that “the large-scale systematic violations of women’s and girls’ fundamental rights in Afghanistan, abetted by the Taliban’s discriminatory and misogynist policies and harsh enforcement methods, constituted gender persecution and an institutionalized framework of gender apartheid”.
A year later, he further endorsed that “gender apartheid most fully encapsulates the institutionalized and ideological nature of the abuses in question and places the responsibilities of other international actors to respond appropriately squarely into view.”
Further, as specified in Article 2(h) of the Draft Convention on Crimes Against Humanity (A/74/10), the institutionalised regime of systematic subjugation, segregation and persecution of women and girls is integral to the maintenance of the Taliban’s regime” (emphasis added).
Women without rights
The Taliban’s primary concern appears to be internal legitimacy, and in its world view, controlling women altogether overrides the devastating impact on the economy that restrictions on women’s rights and employment cause.
Hunger crisis is affecting a third of the population, especially women and children. Nancy Dupree’s analysis of the maintaining sanctity of the Afghan family – the cornerstone of the Taliban 1’s (1996-2001) political project to install a pure Islamic state – provides incisive insight on this question.
In The Family During Crisis in Afghanistan, she writes, “Taking advantage of the deeply embedded attitudes toward the centrality of women in the social concepts of family and honour, Taliban policies wrapped entrenched customary practices and patriarchal attitudes in the mantle of Islam. They were then manipulated to maintain power. By imposing strict restraints directly on women, the new rulers sent a message of their intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, thereby strengthened the impression that they were capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour. These policies were among the most potent instruments of their rule.”
On the other hand, Taliban 2, is confronting women and girls who have been exposed to twenty years of national and international attention focused on transforming the status of women’s rights, albeit the communist regime of 1978-92.
Also read: For Gender-related Persecution, ICC Prosecutor Seeks Arrest Warrants For Top Taliban Leaders
During the Republic, access to health care resulted in reduced maternal mortality rates – 620 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020 compared to 1450 in 2001, 25 million girls attended primary school in 2018, from virtually zero in 2001 and in higher education it stood at over 100,000 in 2021, up from 5,000 in 2001. Gender quotas vaulted women into public life, while EVAW law provided a legal structure of protection.
Admittedly, for a huge swathe of the population in rural areas, especially in provinces where the Taliban since 2006 had made a comeback, nothing much changed. However, millions of women and girls, especially those belonging to ethnic groups such as the Hazaras: 9% and Tajiks: 27 % were quick to respond to the opportunities opening up.
Then, the Taliban’s interlocking structure of a 100 decrees largely targets controlling women depriving them of education, jobs, movement without a mahram (male relative), access to public spaces and denial of personhood epitomized in the anonymity of the chadari (burqa). Now codified in the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, 2024, regulations are punitively enforced by the ubiquitous Amr bil-Maruf , the morality police, and male family members are held responsible for violations of family honour.
The PVPV has effectively walled in women and girls, even blocking windows that might allow men to look in or women to look out.
Daily edicts announce more restrictions on women’s dwindling access to jobs in the private and NGO sector, and even in the few jobs that women still have access to in the public sector, there is a discriminatory plateauing of salaries.
While incomes have declined, dependency has increased adding to the extreme livelihood crisis.
Education rights curbed
Particularly cruel has been the discriminatory denial of education to girls beyond sixth grade, which is now likely to be reduced to third grade as 11-12-year-old girls also “look too mature”.
This has produced a veritable epidemic of mental illness, suicidal ideation and early marriage. The latest decree closes down the last option available for education and jobs, training in nursing and midwifery, portending a major health crisis in the future.
Left are the madrasas. In fact, the Taliban also used girl students from these madrasas to face down ‘Bread, Work, Freedom’ protesters at Kabul University.
Rising domestic violence, misuse of morality law
Expectedly, domestic violence has surged as the institutional structures for gender justice have been dismantled and the status of once-earning women has dwindled.
Sons chastise their own mothers for violations, reflecting the impact of the pervasive propaganda seen in media, wall posters and mosques, that hold women’s moral turpitude responsible for Afghanistan’s crises.
Particularly vulnerable are women who had dared to appeal to the courts against domestic violence under EVAW law.
In one such case of life-threatening bodily violence, the courts ordered the husband’s arrest. However, released by the Taliban, he is usually back beating up his wife again.
According to field reports, the husband mocked his wife and said, “Now, you don’t have any support. The previous government was your supporter. Now the government is mine.”
Public floggings and executions have become the rule while crowds gather to witness the morality tale ending. A recent incident involved a young female doctor who had lost her personal phone.
The phone was found to contain a video of a friendly conversation with an “unrelated” male which was used to then blackmail the doctor. Eventually, it was seized by the morality police, and the woman was arrested and publicly flogged.
In the homily delivered subsequently, the authorities said, “This woman was a doctor and she did this. If you all come out of your homes, you will do worse. This is why we are imposing rules.”
Despite the overwhelming sense of desperation and despair resulting from the systematic and institutionalised oppression, what is truly inspiring is the continuing resistance of women and girls in Afghanistan.
The initial spurt of highly visible public protests across the provinces have been brutally suppressed, with many arrested, tortured and forcibly disappeared, but on social media, there is still evidence of irrepressible symbolic protests.
Small, secret groups of protestors gather in homes, local women journalists linked to transnational advocacy networks providing regular feed to the exiled media on Afghan women’s rights, local female lawyers and counsellor networks bolstered by Afghan jurists in the trans-Atlantic diaspora, and more.
Evidently, concerns about the denial of humanity of women and girls of Afghanistan and the institutionalised system of gender apartheid are still lightweight in comparison to the realpolitik considerations of India’s national interest.
Expectedly, there will be no boycott of the Afghanistan cricket team either.
Rita Manchanda is a scholar and activist.
