Return of Taliban triggers new hate wave in India
Hindu hardliners begin trending #GoToAfghanistan while Muslim clerics call for an end to co-education
The Indian government has been faced with a strange dilemma since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.
On Aug. 31, within hours of US forces departing the war-torn nation, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) announced that its envoy to Qatar, Deepak Mittal, had met with the head of the Taliban’s political office, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai.
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This triggered a debate about India toeing a pragmatic line and heading toward establishing formal relations with the Taliban, though the MEA said the discussions focused on safety, security and the early return of Indian nationals stranded in Afghanistan.
The Narendra Modi government has always viewed the Taliban as a terror organization and refused to adopt the softer line that required it to differentiate between "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban."
Some Hindu hardliners would have nothing of its new, softer approach and went on the offensive.
“You want to spin charkha to Taliban, please try it,” Major General G.D. Bakshi, a retired army officer, said as if throwing a challenge to the Indian government.
The charkha, or spinning wheel, is regarded as the physical embodiment and symbol of Mahatma Gandhi's constructive resistance to British colonial power and Bakshi only meant to convey that the Taliban cannot be influenced by Gandhian philosophy.
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However, a dozen public figures including veteran politicians, retired bureaucrats, activists and journalists said the Modi government should have a deeper engagement with the Taliban.
“No country in the region should be excluded from nor isolate itself from collaborative efforts to bring peace in Afghanistan and promote national reconciliation,” they said in a written appeal.
The dilemma witnessed in the higher echelons of capital New Delhi was reflected on the ground, among the nation’s Muslims who constitute slightly less than 14 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion and are often at the receiving end of Hindu extremists’ hate.
Some were apparently ecstatic at the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and couldn’t hold back.
A number of Muslim clerics openly endorsed the Taliban takeover and even sought an end to the concept of school co-education in their home country.
Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, an organization of Islamic scholars belonging to India’s Deobandi school of thought from whom the Taliban draw their ideology, called for separate schools for boys and girls and urged non-Muslims to stop sending their daughters to co-education schools or colleges.
This was necessary, the organization said, to “keep them away from immorality and bad behavior.”
Samajwadi Party lawmaker Shafiqur Rehman Burq sought to justify events in Afghanistan by saying: “When India was under British rule, our country fought for freedom. Now the Taliban wants to free their country and run it.”
The police in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), initiated penal action against the veteran socialist leader.
The BJP and other pro-Hindu outfits were quick to jump on the bandwagon, expressing apprehension about the “attempt to Talibanize” India.
Soon the hashtag #GoToAfghanistan began trending on Indian social media, with some Muslims countering it with their support for the Taliban.
India’s top actor Naseeruddin Shah posted a video on Twitter calling on India’s Muslims to introspect.
“Even as the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan is a cause for concern for the whole world, celebrations of the barbarians in some sections of the Indian Muslims is no less dangerous,” he warned.
“Every Indian Muslim should ask themselves if they want reform and modernity in Islam or the barbarian values of the past few centuries.”
The last fortnight has witnessed how the disturbing events and ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan have impacted both Hindus and Muslims in multi-religious and multilingual India.
The worst thing is that this mob mentality is now invading the country’s premier institutions such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which has decided to introduce a new optional course on fighting terrorism for its engineering students.
The title of the course, “Counter-Terrorism, Asymmetric Conflicts and Strategies for Cooperation Among Major Powers,” drew criticism from intellectuals and political leaders.
Marxist leader Brinda Karat said the BJP government is only trying to impose its Hindutva agenda on students but JNU vice-chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar defended his decision by saying the course was intended to equip India with “adequate responses in the case of any eventuality.”
“The way things have unfolded in India’s neighborhood is proving highly detrimental to India's national security,” he said in a not-so-subtle reference to Afghanistan in a statement.
Pro-Hindu organizations including academic and student bodies welcomed the JNU decision.
“Counter-terrorism requires the use of advanced technology to gather information, collect intelligence inputs, analyze and use appropriate technical solutions in the best possible manner. An engineer entrusted with such a task is expected to have basic knowledge of the objectives of terror outfits,” wrote senior BJP leader Seshadri Chari in an article for the online news portal The Print.
The only takeaway from the deluge of recent unsavory events and statements seems to be that democratic India needs to learn from what’s happening in Afghanistan and keep its homegrown fundamentalism in check.
Many Afghan Sikhs and Hindus have landed safe and sound in India. But they are at a crossroads. The Afghan land and society they left behind continue to linger in the back of their minds.
Memories can be beautiful but to these ill-fated evacuees who keep talking to the media in choked voices, some sobbing inconsolably, they serve as a melancholic trap.
The memories of Afghanistan keep recurring because the evacuees are not sure how long they are welcome in India.
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They are here on a six-month electronic visa and so making any long-term plan at this stage may not be feasible. Adding to their anxiety is the reported cancellation of at least 11,000 visas issued by the Indian embassy in Afghanistan.
“The tragedy is felt all the more because extraordinary hopes were infused in people’s hearts and minds during the past two decades. The days of bans on girls' education, music, entertainment and sports are back again,” an evacuee said.
Afghan Sikh lawmaker Narender Singh Khalsa broke down twice while recalling how his family had lived in Afghanistan for three generations and had to leave everything behind now.
“What we have in Afghanistan now is zero,” he said in a choked voice.
Santosh Gurpreet, a student of political science, had visited India for a family function in the past. “You all are very fortunate. You cannot imagine the life people live in Afghanistan under the Taliban,” he said.
He replied in the negative when asked if Afghanistan’s problems were caused due to people’s reluctance to take on the hardliners. “The real issue is corruption,” he said. “The history of the land has been a mix of violence, deception and drug money.”
“Baksheesh is the most commonly used word. It’s Arabic for gift and has become a part and parcel of Afghan people’s lives,” Santosh added.
A 52-year-old Hindu woman agreed with him. “My father used to say corruption came to Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion [in 1979],” she said, recalling the Russian word for bribe, vizyatka, and explaining it meant “take it, it’s for you.”
Afghan society had decayed so much that no one could live on a regular or known source of income anymore, she said.
Noor Mariam, a 45-year-old Muslim woman, said that without a doubt the conditions of Afghans and especially women were pitiable.
“The withdrawal of Western forces was planned very badly. The Americans need to explain why they treated Afghanistan like a hunting ground and then decided to leave it suddenly,” she said.
Many acknowledged that the Americans and Britons, especially church workers, brought in fresh ideas for improving the lives of women but abandoned Afghanistan “without giving adequate strength” to the Afghan elected government and military.
Another Muslim evacuee, Jahangir, who requested that his second name be withheld, said rather caustically: “Talking of our Afghan society, it is imperative to understand that even Americans lost hope. I think they realized that corruption was so high that no one could be trusted.”
He said deception was a way of life in the Central Asian country. “Dhokha (betrayal) is the order of the day. That’s why the Afghan forces did not fight the Taliban after the Americans left,” he added.
Kawaljeet, a 42-year-old father of three, said the real problem was that nobody knew what Afghan civil society wanted.
“Americans, British and German workers spent months in places like Kandahar and Ghazni, and yet they could not understand the real Afghan society. I was born and brought up in Kabul and studied in the US, but even I failed to understand them,” he said.
Kawaljeet worked part-time for the Indian embassy in 2019 but his predicament is no different from the other Afghan evacuees who have landed in India.
India brought over 550 people on six flights from Kabul and Dushanbe as of Aug. 27. Of these, over 260 were Indian nationals including embassy staff.
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesman Arindam Bagchi has said the Afghan nationals who have landed in India would stay under the six-month visa scheme. “We will take it from there. That’s the current plan. This is an evolving situation,” he said.
There are other problems facing Afghan nationals. One woman said her extended family got split and landed in three different countries. While some came with her to India, a few others were seen by her boarding a German aircraft while the rest she thought could be either in Pakistan or still held up at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The bureaucratic hurdles and complexities are such that Rangina Kargar, a member of the House of the People of Afghanistan, was not allowed to enter India and was deported to Istanbul via Dubai despite a diplomatic passport.
“We were moving to the new e-emergency visa system. It appears that all this could have led to some confusion, which led to the unfortunate incident of denial of entry to a particular Afghan national,” the MEA spokesman said.
The cancellation of over 11,000 visas issued physically from Aug. 12-14 before the Indian mission closed down in Afghanistan was attributed to the Indian government’s apprehensions that they may be “misused” by disgruntled elements and anti-India groups operating from Pakistan.
Afghan nationals have been asked to travel to India only on an electronic visa.
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