Aziza Mukhammedova and Raykhona Abdullaeva examine India’s cautious yet consequential political rapprochement with the Taliban, set against the backdrop of accelerating shifts in South Asia’s geopolitical landscape. It takes as its starting point the 10 October 2025 meeting in New Delhi between Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi – the first high-level bilateral encounter since the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in August 2021. The authors argue that India’s decision to upgrade its technical mission in Kabul to the level of an embassy does not signal imminent de jure recognition of the Taliban regime, but instead reflects a deliberately calibrated strategy of “maximum engagement without recognition,” allowing New Delhi to protect core interests while maintaining formal political distance.
A key emphasis of the brief is India’s reliance on economic and humanitarian instruments as tools of soft power in Afghanistan. Drawing on trade data from Afghanistan’s National Statistics and Information Authority, the authors show that Afghanistan runs a rare and growing trade surplus with India, making New Delhi a vital source of foreign currency and deepening Kabul’s structural dependence on Indian markets. India’s delivery of wheat, vaccines, medical supplies and other aid since 2021 has further consolidated its image as Afghanistan’s principal humanitarian partner. This blend of trade asymmetry and sustained humanitarian engagement, the brief contends, enables India to lock in influence in Afghanistan while avoiding the political costs of formal recognition of the Taliban, particularly in light of ongoing human rights violations, including gender-based restrictions.
The brief situates this Afghan policy within a wider regional reconfiguration in which India seeks to offset the tightening China–Pakistan axis and emerging subregional alignments. It highlights the rapid warming of relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh, facilitated and encouraged by Beijing, and the deepening of Sino-Pakistani cooperation through the Belt and Road Initiative and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. These trends risk marginalising India from key trade and transport routes and heightening its geoeconomic isolation. Simultaneously, the United States’ fluctuating sanctions policy on Iran’s Chabahar port constrains India’s preferred connectivity strategy to Central Asia. Against this backdrop, closer ties with Kabul become less an optional vector of influence and more a strategic necessity for India to retain access to the wider Eurasian space.
In its conclusion the authors argue that India’s engagement with the Taliban is best understood as a defensive adaptation to an unfavourable regional environment rather than a normative shift in favour of the current Afghan authorities. New Delhi is portrayed as operating under conditions in which it can no longer freely choose its partners, but must instead optimise limited options. The authors suggest that India will likely continue to deepen economic and humanitarian ties with Afghanistan while deferring any decision on formal recognition until broader international legitimacy for the Taliban emerges, if at all. In the meantime, India’s Afghan policy remains a high-stakes experiment in damage limitation – an attempt to preserve strategic relevance in a region where other actors increasingly shape the balance of power.
* The Institute for Advanced International Studies (IAIS) does not take institutional positions on any issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IAIS.
