Impact on India continues...

India’s apprehensions of an enhanced role for Pakistan in Afghanistan have to a large extent driven India’s approach to the Taliban as well. India continues to see the Taliban as Pakistan’s proxy, incapable of negotiating independently. There are concerns that Taliban’s involvement in Afghanistan’s future political setup would invariably provide an opportunity for Pakistan to enhance its own influence in the country. The attack on the Indian Embassy kn Kabul in 2008, which was traced back to the Haqqani Network and the top leadership of the Pakistan Army, has reinforced India’s

fears of a Taliban-Pakistan collusion in the future.

Taliban’s ideology and the memory of what transpired in Afghanistan during the Taliban era has also shaped India’s

opposition to the group. India claims that Pakistani groups like

Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Hizb-ulMujahideen were provided a safe haven and operating space in

Afghanistan during the 1990s. Such allegations were confirmed by

the US airstrikes on suspected al Qaeda training camps in Khost

that turned out to be a Hizb-ul Mujahideen base. The Taliban’s

complicity in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines IC-814 in 1999

further strengthened India’s fears about the Taliban.

The Indian Ministry of Defence, in its Annual Report for 2000-2001, articulated the concerns succinctly, “any fundamentalist regime in

Afghanistan such as the Taliban, could be an insidious threat for our secularism, and a potentially destabilising factor in Kashmir.”

Although, India has now reluctantly extended support for an

Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process, the idea of ‘good’

Taliban has never found a very receptive audience in India. It has

often been rejected as a western construct meant to facilitate an

orderly and face saving exit from Afghanistan. S. M. Krishna, then

India’s External Affairs Minister, had said in 2010, “there should be

no distinction between a good Taliban and a bad Taliban.” Shashi

Tharoor, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs, echoed

similar sentiments in 2010 when he said that there “are no ‘good

terrorists’, and those who strike Faustian bargains with such

elements are often left to rue the consequences for their own

countries.

To be continued....