Differences and Diplomacy

Diplomacy necessitates focusing on commonalities, rather than on differences, in the hope that the larger outcomes lead to betterment, even if they are still far from perfect. For India to only focus on Taliban's obvious wrongs would only perpetuate the divide and worsen portents, whereas engagement and interaction could lead to possibilities of positive changes for India (and Afghanistan), in every realm

- BHOPINDER SINGH

Much hullabaloo was made of Afghanistan's acting Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi’s press conference at the Afghan Embassy, where women journalists were disallowed. While India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) clarified that it had no role in organizing the press interaction, there was widespread criticism of Delhi's supposed acquiescence of gender discrimination. Civil society, journalists, and opposition leaders, called out the Taliban government's discriminatory act.

Firstly, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) grants privileges and immunities that extend to invitations and accesses to embassies in any host country. So technically, the Afghanistan Embassy in Delhi was well within its right to filter the audience that it sought to engage with its Foreign Minister, however picky it was in making those choices. If gender was the discriminatory factor here, one can only imagine the sort of filters that an Embassy of say Israel, China, or North Korea, would deploy whilst planning engagement with their respective authority figures in Delhi. It is highly unlikely that a Tibetan or even a journalist from the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh would get invited to the Chinese Embassy in Delhi.

Importantly, Muttaqi did make amends quickly and included women journalists in his second press conference. He unconvincingly attributed the earlier exclusion to “short notice.” The implausible “short notice” notwithstanding, the fact that he denied the charges of gender discrimination and made the necessary inclusions subsequently must be lauded, especially coming from a representative of a regressive, puritanical, and hyper-religious regime like the Taliban. If anything, Muttaqi chose to acquiesce to the “normalcy” of the host nation as opposed to insisting on the known sensibilities of his own government. The diplomatic adjustment and compromise ultimately came from Muttaqi’s side.