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If Taliban engages with Afghan govt, India can drop its hesitations: Former envoy Amar Sinha

India can engage with the Taliban if the group engages with the Afghan government and is acceptable to Afghan people, India’s former ambassador to Afghanistan and a member of the National Security Advisory Board Amar Sinha said at WION’s World Order event in Delhi on Thursday. 

“Only way forward is ceasefire and Taliban engaging with the Afghan government, Afghan people, once they engage with them, India will have no hesitation with engaging with Taliban,” Sinha said. 

Explaining, he added, “Let the Afghan people accept them, we have stood behind Afghan govt, its good policy to carry and it is a matter of a month when we would be engaging, as they say, very popular Hindi song, ‘apna time ayega’, our time will come. Afghanistan is not going away.”

India’s official policy on the Afghan peace process has been “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-Controlled” talks with the Afghan government playing a key role. 

He said India won’t be forgiving Taliban easily and its links with Pakistan are well known, highlighting that its “deputy leader is Haqqani who is an ISI agency and all the attacks in Kabul, against India has been carried out by them. So, I don’t think we should forgive them as easily.”

India, as a policy doesn’t engage with the Taliban. The only contact happened during the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airline IC 814 when the plane was taken to Kandahar and the country was under the control of the Taliban.

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 Asked, if New Delhi should engage with the Taliban like other countries are as part of the peace process, Mr Sinha said, “Not engaging with the Taliban has not boomeranged at all.”

“We have absolutely zero equity with Taliban, all our equity is with the Republic of Afghanistan and young and modern Afghanistan, where we have a very good standing,” he said. 

He said India’s “position has been very mature” and if one looks around “what is happening… just about everyone is following a me-too policy” and while countries like China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran have been talking with Taliban “what has been achieved, nothing, the violence level is as high.”

Amar Sinha, along with former Indian envoy to Pakistan TCA Raghavan in 2018 represented India at a “non-official” level at Moscow talks on Afghanistan in which Taliban was also present but no statement was made by any of the Indian diplomats.

Last week, US President Donald Trump made a surprise visit to Afghanistan and announced that Washington will start talks with the Taliban but one of the pre-condition will be a ceasefire, meaning putting an end to violence by the grouping in the landlocked South Asian country. 

US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad will “rejoin talks” with Taliban in Doha according to the state department that could “lead to intra-Afghan negotiations and a peaceful settlement of the war, specifically a reduction in violence that leads to a ceasefire”

President Trump had cancelled the talks with the Taliban in September after an attack killed US solider in Afghanistan. 

Source: dnaindia.com