The Taliban foreign minister of Afghanistan, Amir Khan Muttaqi, is in India on his first official visit, from October 9 to 16. He will meet External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday and then visit seminaries in Agra and Deoband.This is a crucial moment in India’s foreign policy, as New Delhi engages with the Taliban while it is yet to grant official recognition to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Changing geopolitical situations and India’s security calculus have dictated this path, but New Delhi has tricky territory to navigate, especially with the Taliban’s treatment of women and other regressive policies.Who is Amir Khan Muttaqi?Muttaqi has an interesting backstory. He was born in 1970 in Helmand province, where his family, originally from Paktia, had relocated.At the age of 9, Muttaqi moved to neighbouring Pakistan, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There, he studied religious and traditional sciences in various schools for Afghan refugees. In his early years, Muttaqi actively participated in the struggle against the communist regime in Helmand.In 1994, as the Taliban movement emerged, he was associated with the group. Shortly after the Taliban seized Kandahar in 1994, he was appointed Director General of the radio station in Kandahar along with being a member of the Taliban’s High Council.In March 2000, he was appointed Minister of Education, a position he held until the American invasion of Afghanistan.Explained | India sides with Taliban, Pakistan & China, slams Trump bid to take over Bagram baseIn February 2019, he was chosen as a member of the Taliban’s negotiation team with the US. And, after the Taliban came back to power in August 2021, he has served as the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs.Story continues below this adMuttaqi’s personal trajectory shows how key members of the Taliban spent their formative years in precarious situations and took to the gun early.Past imperfectFor India, one of the earliest notable conversations with the Taliban was in 1999-2000, when then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh was in touch with the Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil following the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 to Kandahar in December 1999.An anecdote from 2000, in academic Avinash Paliwal’s book, My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan, from the Soviet Invasion to the US withdrawal, illustrates India’s troubles in engaging with the Taliban.Sometime in 2000, the Taliban emissary to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Saleem Zaeef, paid a visit to India’s then ambassador in Islamabad, Vijay K Nambiar. While the meeting was cordial, the whole exercise, according to Nambiar, lacked substance.Story continues below this ad“I realised that there was no way in which we (Taliban and India) are going to be truly connected with each other in any kind of an understanding”. He believed that Taliban had been unable to swing itself out of the “Pakistani circle of reasoning”, making it difficult for India to seriously engage with them, the book says.‘Cautious engagement’Since the Taliban captured Kabul in 2021, India has engaged with the Taliban in a gradual and incremental manner. Officials call it a case of “cautious engagement”.On August 31, 2021, hours after the last US military aircraft flew out of Kabul, India made its first official contact with the Taliban, when the ambassador to Qatar, Deepak Mittal, met the head of the Taliban political office in Doha, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, at the Indian embassy in Doha.The Indian side said the meeting took place at the request of the Taliban. Stanekzai, who had been trained in Indian Military Academy in Dehradun in the 1980s, went on to become deputy Foreign minister in the Taliban regime.Story continues below this adThe meeting in Doha followed Stanekzai’s statements a few days before, when he said India is “very important for this subcontinent” and his group wants to continue Afghanistan’s “cultural”, “economic”, “political” and “trade ties” with India.Then, after the Taliban announced a cabinet with inadequate representation of ethnic minorities and no woman member, India called for an “inclusive dispensation” in Afghanistan.Also Read | Formalised ‘gender apartheid’: What Taliban’s new ‘morality law’ means for Afghan womenIn September 2021, India officially acknowledged the Taliban as “those in positions of power and authority across Afghanistan”.In December 2021, by sending the first consignment of medicines to Afghanistan — 1.6 tons of essential medicines — New Delhi made its intent clear: to open a window to the new Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and put its foot in the door. For the top leadership in Delhi, the political call to differentiate between the Taliban regime and the people of Afghanistan was taken.Story continues below this adIn early June 2022, in the first official Indian visit to Kabul since the Taliban takeover, a team led by a senior MEA official Joint Secretary J P Singh, met Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.In December 2022, India expressed concern over reports that the Taliban had banned women from universities in Afghanistan.By end of 2023, the Afghan embassy said that it was ceasing its operations from October, citing “lack of support from the host government”, failure to “meet expectations… to serve the best interests of Afghanistan”.In January 2024, Muttaqi held a meeting of diplomats from 11 neighbouring and regional countries, including India, and proposed establishing a “region-centric narrative aimed at developing regional cooperation for a positive and constructive engagement between Afghanistan and regional countries.”Story continues below this adJanuary 2025: Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri flew to Dubai to meet Muttaqi and held a substantive meeting.Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met Acting Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai today.Both sides discussed India’s ongoing humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, bilateral issues and security situation in the region. India reiterated its… pic.twitter.com/5yNFjeSMjr— ANI (@ANI) January 8, 2025May 2025: Jaishankar spoke to Muttaqi on telephone on May 15, days after India and Pakistan agreed to stop military strikes in the wake of Operation Sindoor, conducted after the Pahalgam terror attack. The Kabul regime had condemned the terror attack.Why engage with them nowFrom the very first meeting with Indian officials in June 2022, Muttaqi had underlined that “India’s help is more than welcome”. In fact, Taliban officials had said that while the US role had been for their “selfish reasons”, India had been very generous, keeping in minds the needs of the Afghanistan people.In their conversations with key Taliban leaders, Indian officials got the sense that the Taliban is “ready to engage” and is desperately looking for assistance to improve the country’s infrastructure.If India furthers engagement with the Taliban, questions will be raised about New Delhi’s reaction to the medieval-era practices the Taliban is implementing.Story continues below this adHowever, the global situation has changed in the last few years. Taliban’s benefactor and ally, Pakistan, has turned into an adversary, Iran has been weakened considerably, Russia is fighting its own war and the US is behaving differently under Donald Trump 2.0. Most importantly, China is making inroads in Afghanistan by exchanging ambassadors with the Taliban.India has come to the conclusion that this is the right time to upgrade the level of official engagement with the Taliban— or it will lose out on years of investment in Afghanistan, which is very significant to India’s security calculations.Also, one key difference between Taliban’s last stint in power and this time is that within the country, the group faces no strong political opposition. That Delhi sides with the Taliban against Trump’s bid to take back the Bagram air base is a sign of how much the needle has moved.The Pakistan angleTaliban’s fraught ties with Pakistan have added a layer in India’s ties with Kabul. With thousands of Afghan refugees being sent back by Pakistan’s establishment, India has offered assistance and material support in dealing with the crisis.Story continues below this adIndia has so far dispatched several shipments of humanitarian assistance consisting of 50,000 MTs of wheat, 300 tonnes of medicines, 27 tonnes of earthquake relief aid, 40,000 litres of pesticides, 100 million polio doses, 1.5 million doses of Covid vaccine, 11,000 units of hygiene kits for the drug de-addiction programme, etc. The two sides have also discussed strengthening sports (cricket) cooperation, which is highly valued by the young generation of Afghanistan.It was also agreed to promote the use of Chabahar port for supporting trade and commercial activities, including for the purpose of humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan.What the Taliban wants from IndiaThe Taliban has urged India to issue visas for Afghan businessmen, patients and students. This is a hard ask, mainly because of three reasons — the Indian government doesn’t officially recognise the Taliban government, there is a security threat perception in the Indian establishment about the visa seekers from Afghanistan, and the Indian government doesn’t have a functional visa section at the embassy in Kabul and doesn’t have functional consulates.But Delhi is willing to consider going ahead with development projects in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, and that is an important commitment.