India’s engagement with Taliban should redefine Tajikistan relationship

The Narendra Modi government’s swift move to offer humanitarian assistance and development cooperation to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by sending an official delegation to Kabul clearly has sent shock waves in the neighbourhood of the Islamic Emirate.

While the delegation led by India’s Afghan expert J P Singh is slated to return from Kabul today, it is quite evident that the Indian official quietly met the top Taliban leadership in the Afghan capital and discussed the next steps in taking the bilateral cooperation forward. Fact is that both sides were looking forward to the meeting which apparently caught both Pakistan and China unawares.

The Indian pragmatic engagement of the Taliban is expected to trigger a fresh approach of New Delhi towards Afghanistan’s neighbour Tajikistan as it has a deeply adversarial relationship with the Sunni Pashtun force across the Amu Darya in Kabul. After the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Tajikistan under its authoritarian ruler Emomali Rahmon conducted military drills near its over 1300 km border with Afghanistan, alongside troops from members of the Russia-led Collective Security Organization.

Although India built a civilian hospital in Farkhor in southwestern Tajikistan and virtually across the border with Afghanistan way back in the 1990s to not only help the local population but also treat the Northern Alliance members injured in Afghan civil strife, New Delhi should have a recalibration of its relationship with Tajikistan as the latter has moved very close to Beijing in the past decade. China today is Tajikistan’s biggest debt holder and its biggest investor.

Since Tajikistan is largely a remittance-based economy, it is clearly under the Chinese debt trap and hence has compromised with the Xi Jinping regime to the extent of allowing Beijing to use its military base on its border with the restive Xinjiang region. Fact is that Dushanbe is a supporter of Chinese repressive policies against Sunni Muslim Uighur community in the Xinjiang region and has allowed Chinese companies to mine gold, silver and other mineral ores in Upper Kumarg goldfield in the Sughd province. China is also building an airbase in Tashkurgan, which will clearly help the PLA to monitor any Uighur secessionist activity in the Wakhan Corridor on the China-Afghanistan-Tajikistan border in the name of counter-terror cooperation.

It is perhaps due to the growing Chinese presence in Tajikistan and its service provider-client relationship with Pakistan that India really had a joint military air base just in name across the Afghan border with Dushanbe succumbing to pressures from China and Russia. China made it known to Tajikistan that it was apprehensive of Indian actions in Afghanistan and in Central Asia. This is despite India giving grants in aid, food, medicine, vaccine and humanitarian assistance in the past decades.

With the Northern Alliance passing into Afghan history and the Chinese presence rising in Tajikistan through the Belt-Road-Initiative debt trap, India needs to redefine its foreign policy objectives in Dushanbe. Perhaps, the Indian engagement with the Taliban is the first step in this direction.