Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi provided clarification on Sunday following the furore over the absence of women journalists at a press conference he held in New Delhi on Friday.
Criticism came in particular from India’s opposition Congress Party, which rebuked Narendra Modi’s government. The Indian government was asked to clarify its position on the matter and its silence on “discrimination” was questioned.
Subsequently, the Indian news agency ANI posted a video of Muttaqi on X today, in which he is seen clarifying the matter in Pashto.
The Afghan Foreign Minister said: “Our teams had contacted a limited number of journalists for the press conference, and only those journalists were invited… It later emerged that some journalists were not on the list. It was nothing more than that.
“Our colleagues thought that those on the list should be invited. Therefore, the participants were limited. It was just this decision and no other.”
While there has been no official comment from the Indian government, Sunrise It was previously reported that the decision on media invitations was made by Taliban officials who accompanied Muttaqi on his visit to India. It cited sources as saying that the Indian side had suggested to the Afghan delegation that women journalists be included among the guests.
Criticism
Criticism for the absence of female journalists came in particular from the leader of the opposition in India, Rahul Gandhi, who posted in
“Their silence in the face of such discrimination exposes the emptiness of their slogans on Nari Shakti (women’s power).”
Her post followed Congress General Secretary Priyanka Vadra’s message in which she asked whether the Prime Minister’s recognition of women’s rights was “just a convenient stance from one election to the next”, and questioned how such an “insult to some of India’s most competent women” could have been allowed.
“Prime minister @narendramodi ji, please clarify your position on the expulsion of women journalists from the press conference of the Taliban representative on his visit to India,” he said in X.
Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh posted in X: Ban (on talis) on women journalists in India. “It is shocking and unacceptable that the Indian government has accepted this, and also in New Delhi on the eve of International Day of the Girl.”
Similarly, former finance minister P. Chidambaram said: “Journalists should have left when they discovered that their female colleagues had been excluded (or not invited).”
Communist Party of India general secretary D. Raja, tagging India’s foreign minister in his
“Allowing such an exclusion here is blasphemy to our constitutional spirit.”
Raja urged the Ministry of External Affairs to explain how it agreed to “allow this discriminatory spectacle.”
“This is not a diplomatic nuance. It is food for the patriarchal ideology that wants to erase half the world from public life. We must denounce it without hesitation,” he added.
The Afghan Taliban, who promised softer rule after regaining power in Kabul in August 2021, have imposed sweeping restrictions on women, banning them from universities, public parks, gyms and beauty salons, measures the UN has called “gender apartheid.”
