Amir Khan Muttaqi, ‘Foreign Minister’ of Taliban administration. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Four years after the Taliban took charge of Afghanistan in a violent movement, Amir Khan Muttaqi, the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Taliban administration, will travel to India next week, officials of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on Thursday (October 2, 2025). The visit is expected to be focused on developmental assistance to Afghanistan, which has been struggling with scarcity of essential medicines and agricultural products ever since the Taliban took over Kabul on August 15, 2021, the officials further said.

The visit has been under consideration for some time, and Mr. Muttaqi could not travel earlier as India has been sensitive to the fact that he, like several other Taliban leaders, continues to be placed under international sanctions because of the violent struggle that the Taliban carried out against the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan starting in the winter of 2001, the sources said. 

A major hurdle in normalising diplomatic relations with the Taliban has been the outfit’s inflexible position on shutting access to education and employment for the women of Afghanistan, and other human rights issues, including the treatment of prisoners. Indian officials indicated that the “temporary exemption” that was issued by the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee on September 30 finally firmed up the plans for Mr. Muttaqi’s India visit.

Mr. Muttaqi is expected arrive here on October 10, the sources said.

India has not granted de jure (by right) recognition to the Taliban regime in Kabul although Mr. Muttaqi has been meeting a number of Indian officials over the past years. In January, he met Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai. Mr. Misri was the highest-ranking Indian official to reach out to the Taliban when the two sides discussed ways to broaden cooperation through the Iranian port of Chabahar.

One of the issues that may come up during Mr. Muttaqi’s visit is likely to be the continued use of the Chabahar port, especially as the United States has ended the 2018 carve-out for India, which allowed New Delhi to use the strategically important Iranian port despite the broad U.S. sanctions against Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that he wants the Bagram air base to revert to the U.S. forces, but the Taliban has rejected that idea.

The visit to New Delhi will be closely watched across India’s neighbourhood as well as beyond as 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 participate in the fifth round of trilateral dialogue with Pakistan and China.

China has been urging the Taliban administration to ensure greater Chinese access to Afghan minerals, and has asked Kabul to join the expanded CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor).

India was one of the several countries that evacuated their diplomats from the Afghan capital when the Taliban took charge in a military blitzkrieg on August 15, 2021. The evacuation process, named Operation Devi Shakti, airlifted around 669 people from August to December 2021. A significant number of those evacuated were part of the minority Sikh and Hindu communities, and political activists of Afghanistan who came under attack and faced arson as the security situation took a downturn with various groups competing for power. On June 18, 2022, a terror attack was carried out by the ISIS on a gurdwara in Kabul, which claimed several lives, including that of several Afghan security personnel.

At the same time, responding to the prevailing situation on the ground, India began sending humanitarian assistance, especially medicines for women and children, to the Indira Gandhi Child Health Hospital in Kabul, from December 2021. The consignments were delivered to World Health Organization officials and the hospital authorities.  

Soon thereafter, India announced that its “historical and civilisational relationship with the Afghan people” would continue. The MEA announced that “a technical team” had been sent to Kabul on June 23, 2022 to “closely monitor and coordinate the efforts of various stakeholders for humanitarian assistance and in continuation of our engagement with the Afghan people”.

The policy of humanitarian assistance while maintaining an ambiguous diplomatic relation continued till most recently, when India flew relief materials to Afghanistan after the August 31 earthquake in the eastern part of the country. Earlier, in November 2024, New Delhi showed greater willingness to broaden engagement with the Taliban when it accepted a Taliban-approved nominee, Ikramuddin Kamil, for the post of ‘Acting Consul General’ in Mumbai. The Taliban administration has diplomatic relations with several countries, including Pakistan, Russia, Iran, the UAE, Qatar, China, and the Central Asian states.

Published – October 02, 2025 11:28 pm IST