Why is India courting the Taliban now?

Meeting between India’s foreign secretary and the Taliban this week has prompted speculation.

The meeting in Dubai between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban, on Wednesday this week has confirmed India’s intentions to raise its influence with the Afghan leadership, analysts say.

India has been gradually upping relations with the Taliban over the past year but this latest meeting marked the first high-level engagement of its kind.

India has invested more than $3bn in aid and reconstruction work in Afghanistan in the past 20 years and a statement from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs laid out the usual talking points: regional developments, trade and humanitarian cooperation plus an agreement to resume developmental projects and to support the health sector and refugees in Afghanistan.

However, it was what was left unsaid in that statement – but which was evident from the timing and agenda of this meeting – that signalled a shift in the geopolitical realities of the region.

For one, the meeting comes just days after India issued a condemnation of Pakistan’s air attacks on Afghanistan which have reportedly killed at least 46 people in the last month.

It also comes on the heels of the Taliban’s appointment of an acting consul in the Afghan consulate in Mumbai, in November last year.

While the Indian government did not comment on the appointment, the timing coincided with a visit by India’s joint secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs to Kabul the same month.

The Taliban’s deployment to Mumbai of Ikramuddin Kamil, a former Afghan student in India-turned Taliban diplomat, places India on a growing list of countries, including Russia, China,