Salman Rafi Sheikh
After swinging its Iran policy from ‘no dictate from the US’ and compliance only with the UN sanctions to completely ditching their purchase of oil from Iran and principally following the US policy of isolating and crippling Iran’s economy, India has now also made a major change in its Afghanistan policy, making a major shift from its previous ‘principled’ position of ‘no talks with the Taliban’ to any political set up for Afghanistan that might help end the war. India has thus completely fallen in line with the US policies vis-à-vis this part of the world i.e. Iran and Afghanistan.
This is a significant development not just because India, despite its geographic limitations, has significant economic presence in Afghanistan, but also because the imperatives of a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban as well as the Talban’s return to politics has received a fresh impetus, making it even less controversial.
In announcing this major departure and scaling down its demand for holding presidential elections before any potential deal with the Taliban, India’s out-going foreign minister said in the recent meeting of SCO that “India stands committed to any process, which can help Afghanistan emerge as a united, peaceful, secure, stable, inclusive and economically vibrant nation, with guaranteed gender and human rights”. What this means is that India does no longer think it viable to impress upon its previous demand of an “Afghan controlled” peace process for the political future of Afghanistan.
However, the question that begs attention is: notwithstanding the importance of what India has said, what really matter is why it has changed its policy now? What mad India shift its stance?
Obviously, one answer would be that India has seen the inevitable i.e. the Taliban’s return to the political power and that it realized that it is about the right time it changed its stance and mend relations with the Taliban, who are inevitably going to be a leading political force in Afghanistan in the post-settlement scenario.
With news of a possible final deal, involving participants from Afghanistan’s all major political groups, including the ruling group, reaching quite rapidly now, India would have practically shot itself in the foot if it had continued to demand presidential elections and an “Afghan controlled” peace process.
Developments within Afghanistan seem to have also helped India change its erstwhile policy. Afghanistan’s Supreme Court recently ruled that president Ghani could stay in power for as long as the next elections were held in September or even beyond the newly set date. What this means in practical terms is that India can now find some satisfaction in the fact that the Ghani-led pro-India political elite will nevertheless have presence in the dialogue process and that they might be able to influence the final outcome in ways that might give advantage in an otherwise strategically disadvantaged territory where the pro-Pakistan Taliban are likely to dominate the political landscape.
But the fact that the deal is already in the pipeline and top US officials, including Mike Pompeo, have already taken Kabul officials in confidence that next round of ‘intra-Afghan’ talks to be held in Doha will be a successful one means that India was left with no option but to change its previous stance.
It was necessary in the wake of virtual isolation that India had been experiencing ever since the beginning of talks with the Taliban. As a matter of fact, all major states, except India, involved in Afghanistan—the US, Pakistan, China, Russia—have somehow successfully and directly engaged with the Taliban in the past and they continue to engage in order to reach a settlement that might satisfy all the concerned parties, including Afghanistan. India had been a left-out party until now and was not a part of the peace-consensus that has developed not only among external actors—the US, Russia, China and Pakistan—but also among Afghanistan’s internal players.
An internal and external consensus is certainly now available that says that peace is the number one priority and the presidential election can take place later. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s former president, told in an interview to the Turkish media given during his recent tour of Moscow that “First peace. The priority for us now is peace in Afghanistan. Once we have peace and stability then we can conduct our elections more properly.”
Doubtlessly, India’s policy had, from the beginning, been, as we pointed in a number of previous stories written for SAM, the exact opposite of what Karzai and a number of other political figures seem to prioritize for Afghanistan.
In this context, therefore, India’s ‘awakening’ to the real ground realities of Afghanistan and seeing which way the wind is blowing is not a result of some realism prevailing in New Delhi; it is more or less a result of India’s attempt to avoid isolation and exclusion from the Afghan saga that is finally coming to an end through negotiations.
