Trinamool Congress’s Krishnanagar MP Mahua Moitra, in an interaction with senior journalist Karan Thapar on his The Interview for The Wire, mounted a scathing offensive on the Narendra Modi government and the Sangh Parivar for allegedly legitimising the Taliban by rolling out the red carpet for their foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
Asked by Thapar if it was fitting and appropriate for a secular democracy, where women have equal rights in every respect with men, to invite Muttaqi as an honoured guest, given the way the Taliban treats Afghan women, Moitra said: “No, no, no, unequivocally no.”
“It’s a black and white question that deserves a black and white answer. There are no shades of grey anywhere in this answer, and there shouldn’t be,” she added, during the 20-minute interview.
Moitra said Team Modi stands guilty not only of normalising or accepting the Taliban’s abysmal record on women’s rights but also of legitimising it.
“This is government to government, using official, taxpayers’ money.... It’s telling you ‘we turn a blind eye to what you do’, or actually saying ‘you know what, we don’t have a problem with it’,” said the Trinamool MP.
Referring to how the Taliban have treated women since returning to power in 2021, Moitra said: “... You’ve got to see, I think, what this entire unsavoury episode has demonstrated, is how similar actually the RSS — which is the basic ideology behind the ruling dispensation in India currently — and the Taliban are.”
“I’m amazed after being invited, that he was given a red-carpet welcome — and I’ve seen... there are welcomes, and there are welcomes... I mean they laid out everything for the man, everything. What really was the first warning signal was the meeting in Hyderabad House... between their foreign minister and S. Jaishankar, who’s India’s foreign minister. In that meeting, there was not one woman official in the Indian delegation. You mean to tell me... that this was purely by accident and not by design?" she asked. “There was not a single woman in the room.”
Moitra underscored how the contentious news meet by Muttaqi at the Afghanistan embassy thereafter disallowed women journalists.
“It is inconceivable... that the Indians would have a) not known about this, and b) not agreed to this. To me, this is absolute complicity,” she said.
Asked if the Centre should have made its displeasure public, she said: “You’re talking as though the Indian government did not know this was about to happen. The Indian government knew... were complicit, and later as all of us... kicked up a fuss, the (Indian) minister of external affairs actually had the gall to put out a one-line presser which said ‘we had nothing to do with this’.”
“You have invited at taxpayers’ money, a member of the Taliban, can we get this right? This is the Taliban. How are we normalising this? This entire episode, what is so dangerous about this is, we are even discussing the exclusion of women. What we should be discussing is the invitation given to a brutal regime that actually criminalises the female gender.... These are mass murderers, how are we even normalising this?” she asked.
She went on to talk about several alleged similarities between the ideologies and the philosophies of the Taliban and the RSS, and said it’s but natural that the Sangh would love them to come to India.
Moitra then landed several direct blows on Modi.
“What is completely farcical is that the Afghan foreign minister has held more press conferences on Indian soil in a few days than the Indian Prime Minister in over 10 years of sitting in his chair, has that struck you? ... I think the Taliban has one up on us even there,” she said.
On how this sits with Modi’s lofty Nari Shakti claims and self-declared Beti Bachao Beti Padhao priorities, Moitra said: “This is a question, I wish in another world we could have asked the Prime Minister, and he would have answered it.”
“You know what, Mr. Prime Minister? We may disagree with your politics, but you are sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair, and all of us, 50 per cent of India, all the women of India... look up to you as a Prime Minister. You have let them all down. This is not a 56-inch chhati (chest)... you couldn’t stand up? You couldn’t tell the Taliban, ‘by the way, I can’t invite you here till you change your policies, I’m sorry’?” she asked. “The US did that to Narendra Modi after Godhra. They didn’t give him a visa.... So that Prime Minister himself has been subject to this. So there was very little that was stopping him.”
In response to the argument of the saffron ecosystem that strategic, geopolitical concerns must take precedence over morals or emotions, Moitra said the proverbial line here is far from thin.
“When we say that delegitimising and dehumanising the female gender of Afghanistan is a matter of only morals, of personal emotions, that’s the problem. It is not. There is no polity, no politics, certainly no geopolitics that India can be a part of which excludes the female race.... This is just bad politics,” she said.
“If Indians think they’re engaging in diplomacy, they’re not. This is complicity in war crimes, not diplomacy,” added Moitra.