Growing proximity to the Taliban regime marks one of the most dramatic recalibrations of New Delhi’s assertive and innovative foreign policy in recent years.
What began in the summer of 2021 as cautious, back-channel humanitarian contact to ensure safe exit of Indians as the Taliban advanced towards Kabul has evolved into a routine of structured, institutionalized, high-frequency, high-level interactions.
Looking more deeply beyond those surface bilateral contacts, we can discern a geopolitical logic that drives India’s quiet and yet very robust rapprochement with the Taliban regime. Representing a rather hard-nosed realism, not an ideological shift, it is an attempt to
reinsert India into Afghanistan’s political economy,
secure western connectivity,
prevent Chinese dominance and
exploit the rare moment of Pakistan-Taliban estrangement.
From reluctant contact to structured engagement
Most aptly capturing this metamorphosis are the recent five-day visit of Afghan Commerce and Industry Minister Alhaj Nooruddin Azizi to New Delhi November 19-23, 2025 and, before that, the six-day visit of Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi October 9-16.
These are not merely symbolic visits. They represent the most formal Taliban-India engagement since the fall of Kabul in August 2021 when India had vacated and shut down its embassy.
The embassy was reopened as a “technical mission” from June 2022. Foreign Minister Muttaqi’s ground-breaking visit last month was the occasion for important agreements on restoring the Kabul mission to embassy status, re-starting air links, engaging in sports cooperation and building for the several healthcare and hydroelectric facilities.
Azizi’s visit saw both sides operationalize the agreements by putting in place processes to reactivate the Kabul-Delhi and Kabul-Amritsar air-freight corridors and explore routes through Iran’s Chabahar port.
According to India’s Ministry of External Affairs Joint Secretary Anand Prakash, the two air-freight corridors are already activated and flights will begin “very soon.” Afghanistan’s Commerce Ministry estimates operations will start within next two months.
Another topic during Azizi’s visit was how India can facilitate Afghan outreach to other countries
No doubt India is seen as wishing to avoid having this structured engagement be interpreted as official recognition of Taliban. Yet the Azizi visit saw both sides agreeing to revive their Joint Working Group on Trade, Commerce and Investment and to post trade officers in each other’s missions.
Such institution-building clearly goes beyond India’s “technical mission” profile and reveals the diplomatic convection currents that have set off India’s tectonic shift.
From economic motives to geopolitical leverage
Azizi’s talks last week were focused on how to boost the $1 billion bilateral trade to its pre-2021 $1.8 billion. For this, Azizi had a sweeping package of incentives for Indian investors: a five-year tax holiday for new industries, a token 1% import duty on machinery and raw materials and preferential land access. He even identified sectors for immediate cooperation:
mining,
hydropower,
pharmaceuticals,
spices and
small and medium enterprises.
The biggest structural change is the push to leverage Iran’s Chabahar Port. Azizi urged India to initiate scheduled shipping lines linking Chabahar with Afghan dry ports, specifically in Nimruz province.
If implemented, this would permanently reduce Afghan dependence on Pakistan’s Torkham and Chaman crossings — aligning these to perfectly fit India’s long-standing strategy of establishing western overland connectivity insulated from Pakistan’s geopolitical leverage.
India’s investments of more than $3 billion in Afghanistan since 2001 include the Zaranj-Delaram highway, the very road linking to Chabahar. The Taliban’s embrace of these assets in the context of rapprochement represents a strategic inversion of history: What was once meant to bypass Taliban-Pakistani influence now serves as to engage Taliban and hedge against Pakistan itself. That’s why Pakistani leaders are calling the Taliban India’s proxy with benefits.
The most important catalyst of India-Taliban rapprochement has been the dramatic deterioration in Pakistan-Taliban relations since 2023. Islamabad’s frustration over the Taliban’s inability to curb the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the last two years of border clashes along the Durand Line and the deportation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan have produced the most hostile phase in Pakistan-Afghanistan ties.
This makes India’s engagement with the Taliban less about ideological acceptance and more about seeking strategic disintermediation of Pakistan from the Afghan equation.
It is this changed geopolitics that creates an opening that India is seizing with methodical precision thanks to its newfound strategic pragmatism. New Delhi fully understands that influence in Kabul during a period of Pakistan-Taliban strain can deliver:
Strategic depth against Pakistan,
Overland access to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf,
Insulation against Chinese expansion via the Belt and Road corridors.
Soft-power anchor to countering terrorism
India’s geopolitical calculus of course remains anchored on its soft power. Its central national-security objectives remain unchanged: Afghan soil must not support anti-India terror outfits, especially those based in Pakistan. This has led to a series of quiet India-Taliban dialogues since 2022 evolving a consensus — reaffirmed during visits of Muttaqi and Azizi — on Taliban 2.0 repeatedly assuring New Delhi that no group hostile to India will be allowed to operate inside Afghan territory.
No doubt, how far these assurances will translate into verifiable outcomes remains uncertain and that fact pushes India to be ready with alternative strategies to address such exigencies.
What is equally important to underline is how India’s pragmatic approach toward the Taliban stands in conformity with other major powers’ dealings with former insurgent movements turned de facto governments.
The United States, China, Russia and the European Union all today practice “engagement without recognition,” using economic and humanitarian channels to secure counterterrorism commitments while maintaining political distance. India is doing the same — but with far greater regional stakes.
The bottom line, however, remains its soft power — as a development and humanitarian partner — that increasingly undergirds India’s engagement with the Taliban. India’s assistance in health, education, pharmaceuticals and food security gives it unmatched soft-power presence. New visa systems for Afghans — particularly medical visas restarted from April — promise to rekindle their people-to-people linkages and counter the negative perceptions created by the suspension of visas post-2021.
Afghanistan’s request for Indian pharmaceutical firms to invest in local production — supported by factory visits planned in 2026 — promises to raise another critical pillar of India’s soft power and further strengthen India’s footprint in Afghanistan.
Was rapprochement inevitable?
From a realist perspective, three structural forces make India-Taliban proximity both logical and inevitable:
The geopolitical power vacuum in Afghanistan: After 2021, India faced a hard truth: disengagement would cede Afghanistan to Pakistan and China. By 2024, Chinese investments in Afghan mining and oil fields, combined with Pakistan’s diplomatic failures with the Taliban, created strategic incentives for India to return to Afghanistan.
Regional connectivity imperatives: India’s investments in Iran’s Chabahar port and its access to Intenational North South Transport Corridore and India-Central Asia corridors; none of these can fructify if Afghanistan is diplomatically frozen.
Major-power precedent: The global pattern of technical engagement without recognition — seen in the United States-Taliban contacts, Russian “Moscow Format” dialogues, and Chinese investment overtures — normalized India’s own recalibration of its engagement with Taliban.
As of now, India’s strategy of rapprochement with the Taliban seems to have evolved into a clear three-layered doctrine:
Economic engagement and connectivity building,
Diplomatic presence short of recognition,
Security assurances as the price of partnership.
The result is a fast-deepening relationship that neither side defines as diplomatic ties but both quietly treat as a strategic opportunity shaped by necessity, history and geopolitical timing.
Swaran Singh is a professor of international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
