Does CAA spell end of the road for visas to Afghans? Three takeaways from India’s visit to Kabul

From March 7, an official delegation of India’s Ministry of External Affairs was in Kabul on a three-day visit. Led by JP Singh, the joint secretary in the ministry in charge of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, the delegation held talks with Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. It met former President Hamid Karzai and also met Afghan businessmen who trade with India.

Here are three takeaways from the visit.

No sign yet visa restrictions will be relaxed

The visit took place days ahead of the government notification of the rules of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. Several thousand Afghans, especially of the minority Hazara and Tajik communities, have been desperate to come to India to flee the Taliban’s persecution. Over the decades, India was a country that gave safe haven to Afghans from the conflicts that ravaged their homeland. 

India’s open-door policy for Afghan refugees and Delhi’s development activities in Afghanistan from about 2004 to 2021, earned India huge goodwill among the people, more than in any other country in the region. At present, India hosts more than 15,000 Afghans who live in India under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 

Previous governments were not just liberal with visas, they also facilitated education with generous scholarship schemes. Some students took up jobs in the universities where they had studied. Traders and businessmen travelled across the country. Afghan patients built years-long relationships with their doctors in India, visiting regularly for consultations. Some Afghans found Indian partners. 

But all that has changed. When the CAA was enacted, the broad message was clear: India would no longer welcome Muslims escaping tyranny in their own countries. But the Afghans, perhaps the only Muslims from the neighbourhood who might have thought of applying for Indian citizenship for reasons of persecution in their own country, remained sanguine. They thought the bonds between the two countries were so deep that nothing could change the generosity of India towards Afghans. Plus, they did not think that India would look at them with the suspicion reserved for Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslims. 

“We thought we would be treated differently,” one Afghan student waiting for a visa in Kabul told me two years ago.

But the days after August 15, 2021 brought a rude awakening. As thousands of Afghans sought to flee their country in the wake of the Taliban takeover, India sent in special planes to evacuate Hindus and Sikhs. But all others found, to their shock, that their existing visas were no longer valid and they could not get new ones. More than 2,000 students who had gone to Afghanistan during the summer break or during the Covid wave, couldn’t return after knocking on many doors for over two years. Most have given up. Some moved to Pakistan to study; others obtained visas to Turkey or western countries. But some who left behind families are still waiting to be reunited. Those who remain in India cannot travel back to Afghanistan even for family emergencies, for fear of not being allowed to reenter. 

In the 30 months since the Taliban takeover, India has processed only a few hundred visas for business or medical emergencies. National security has been the main justification.

In his meeting with the Indian delegation, former President Hamid Karzai conveyed a gentle reminder of how it used to be in the past. And the Taliban, who see India's no visa policy for Afghanistan as a lack of Delhi’s trust in their system, also made a pitch for liberalisation of visas in the meeting with the Indian delegation. 

The CAA rules specify that citizenship application is open only to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Christians and Jains who arrived in India before December 31, 2014. Though Muslims from other South Asian countries are not barred from visiting India, the pointed omission of Muslims in the CAA rules is likely to make even the ordinary visa application process for Muslim visitors fraught. Some Afghans have been told there will be select relaxations in the visa policy after the Indian elections, but there is no guarantee this will happen.  

Meanwhile, the Taliban has begun making a serious outreach to Hindu and Sikh minorities. Last year, the Kabul regime appointed a “Land Grabbing Commission” to return lands seized from Hindus. The Islamic Emirate has pledged that it will protect all minorities. In a newsletter out of March 9, the Commission said it has instructed its technical teams in the provinces and districts to “stabilise and identify lands of Hindu citizens that have been forcibly taken or are likely to be grabbed through fake deeds”.

In Delhi, Guljeet Singh, a representative of Afghan Sikhs, said most of the community who were evacuated by India have left for Canada. Of the families that remain, some 20 to 30 male members were planning to return to Kabul to restart their shops. Many of them were in the homoeopathic medicine trade when they were evacuated from Kabul. 

“They will not take their families with them. But the men need to provide for the families. The gurudwara was supporting us for two years. Now that time is over, and the men need to find jobs. There aren’t any jobs here,” said Singh.  

Manjeet Singh Lamba, a Sikh representative in Kabul, said 200 Sikhs were planning to return to Kabul. Newslaundry could not contact him to independently confirm his announcement. 

India’s engagement with Taliban remains driven by hostility with Pakistan

While India has readily cut off ties to the Afghan people, despite the fact that they have been its biggest asset in Afghanistan over the years, it has increased its engagement with the Taliban in the same period. 

The delegation’s meeting with Muttaqi was confirmation that Delhi remains hopeful that the Taliban regime will protect India’s national security and other interests in Afghanistan. The main driver for Delhi’s engagement with Afghanistan over the years has been the adversarial India-Pakistan relationship. Over the years, building ties with Afghanistan has been India’s low-cost way to keep Pakistan on tenterhooks about its so-called “strategic depth”, except for a five-year period from 1996 to 2001 when the Taliban grabbed state power and ruled Afghanistan for the first time. Then, India identified the Taliban with its creator, the Pakistan army/ISI, and made no attempt to establish relations with it.

But a lesson from that era, which included the shock of the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, was that conflating Taliban and Pakistan could only hurt India. The Taliban’s Pashtun identity is as important as their religious ideology. Despite its best efforts, the Pakistan army has not been able to wipe out Pashtun consciousness by superimposing Islamic extremism on it.

Predictably, the Pashtun identity question came to the fore quickly in Pakistan’s relations with the current Taliban dispensation over the border question and also the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of protecting and harbouring. Additionally, issues have emerged over Pakistan’s presumption that, after the American withdrawal in August 2021, it would now call the shots in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s evident quest to be treated as separate from Pakistan is one of the reasons why India, which shut its Kabul embassy during the 2021 Taliban takeover, soon decided it would be folly to stay out any longer. In June 2022, a “technical team”, comprising mainly security officials, reopened the Indian embassy. By then, over a dozen countries had already reopened their Kabul embassies at non-ambassadorial levels. Some, like Russia and China, had never left. 

While India, like other countries, does not recognise the Taliban regime, it appears to have gone farther than most in engaging with it. After a short interruption in 2021, India-Afghan trade resumed. When the embassy reopened, flights between Kabul and Delhi began twice a week. In October 2022, India signed a new agreement with the Taliban to increase the volume of trade through an air corridor. Last year, Taliban officials attended MEA-funded capacity building classes at IIM Kozhikode where they learned about India, its governance structures, and how its democracy functions.

In January 2024, for the first time, the Indian Embassy in the UAE invited the Taliban representation in Abu Dhabi for its Republic Day reception. A few days later, on January 30, an Indian official from the “technical team” participated in a meeting of representatives of regional countries that the Taliban convened.

Bilal Sarway, a well-informed Afghan journalist who left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, tweeted suggesting that India may be seeking to widen its engagement by reopening the Kandahar consulate. Newslaundry could not confirm this independently.

During last week’s visit, the Indian side emphasised its humanitarian role in Afghanistan but did not raise a key humanitarian crisis – the denial of education to women and their restriction in the public sphere. For optics though, the Indian delegation included a woman official. 

But while tactically useful, the present engagement does not envisage a roadmap for a long game in Afghanistan. That brings no succour to India’s long-standing anti-Taliban political friends in Afghanistan, whom Delhi has given up as not counting for much in the present reality of Afghanistan.

Taliban wants more

As is the Taliban practice, it lost no time in putting out the photographs of the Indian delegation's meetings at the Taliban foreign ministry. Spokesman Abdul Qadir Balkhi tweeted that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “seeks to strengthen political and economic relations with India as an important actor in the region”. The Indian acknowledgement of the visit came a day later.

The Taliban sees every diplomatic engagement as de facto acceptance by the world and a step towards de jure recognition. It was no different this time. As became evident during the power struggle at the Afghan Embassy in Delhi and the eventual departure of diplomats appointed by the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan government, including Ambassador Farid Mamundzay, the Taliban is eager to send its own representatives to Delhi. 

China, meanwhile, is represented in Kabul by an ambassador-rank diplomat. It also accepted a Taliban ambassador in Beijing, who presented credentials to President Xi Jinping in January. In Delhi, work at the Afghan embassy is being handled by the consul-generals at Mumbai and Hyderabad. But with the Taliban keen to increase trade with India, the need for a full-time person in Delhi will have to be addressed.

India is now Afghanistan's second biggest export destination after Pakistan. The Afghan ministry of Industry and Commerce valued its 2023 bilateral trade with India at $779 million (the Indian side is yet to publish the numbers). Of this, $579 million were reported to be exports to India, comprising mainly fruit, dried fruit, and spices, while $200 million were imports, mainly sugar.

Trade takes place mainly through the Wagah border. While Pakistan has stopped trading with India since 2019, it has permitted limited Afghan exports to India through this route, continuing a system that pre-existed the Taliban regime. But India is not allowed to export to Afghanistan through Wagah. 

Afghanistan now wants to ramp up the trade relationship and has been putting pressure on Delhi to “send ships to Chabahar” – the port in Iran jointly developed by India with the aim of connecting by road (and rail) to the Afghan border to give India-Afghan-Central Asia trade a Pakistan bypass. 

India had been playing down the Chabahar link in recent years for a number of reasons, including India-US proximity and Iran’s growing ties with China, which cast a bit of a shadow on India’s own relations with Iran. While the US had given India a Chabahar carve-out from its sanctions on Iran, shipping is tied to international instruments such as insurance. That, and the allure of the US-backed India-Middle East Economic Corridor, had dimmed the appeal of the Iranian port once vaunted as India’s connectivity masterstroke.

However, as tensions in the Red Sea rose with the Iran-backed, Yemen-based Houthis attacking ships passing through and in the vicinity of that strategic shipping corridor, Delhi has sought to renew ties with Iran. On a visit to Tehran in January, Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar said he emphasised India's commitment to Chabahar, and that the two sides discussed a long-term roadmap for India's involvement in the development of the port.

Meanwhile, a Taliban delegation visited the Chabahar port at the end of February to assess facilities for transit trade to and from Afghanistan. During last week’s visit to Kabul by the MEA team, both sides said the expansion of economic ties and trade through Chabahar were discussed.

Afghanistan is also keen that India complete infrastructure projects that it left half finished, including the construction of a dam for water supply to Kabul.

Even if Delhi takes up that offer, it is clear that in common with other countries, India’s engagement with the Taliban, or more generally, its Afghanistan policy, may remain tactical in nature, with no long or medium term direction. This will change only when India’s relationship with Pakistan improves.

Update at 10.30 pm, Mar 13: This piece originally said Delhi ‘remains hopeful that the Taliban regime will protect India’s national security and other interests in Pakistan’. This has been corrected to ‘in Afghanistan’.

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