On Sunday, I woke up to the defiant presence of Indian women journalists confronting the Taliban foreign minister with head-on questions. “What are you doing, sir, in Afghanistan?” a woman journalist asked Amir Khan Muttaqi. “When will Afghan women and girls be allowed to go back and get their right to education?” Muttaqi smiled and said women’s education was not “haram”. But he offered no explanation for why, for four years, Afghan women and girls have been banned from school, university and most jobs.

That Sunday event was the second press conference the Taliban had held in New Delhi in two days. The first had invited only 16 male journalists. Women journalists were left off the list. After outrage, the Afghan embassy dismissed the exclusion as a “technical issue”, stating it had no press officer and didn’t know how to reach everyone. Somehow, they managed to reach only the men.

Anyone familiar with the Taliban’s record knows this was not an oversight. Excluding women has been the defining feature of Taliban rule. In their first week in power, they banned women from working in most public sectors; only those who could not be replaced by men were allowed to remain. Within a month, they barred teenage girls from secondary school. Soon after, women were forbidden from travelling alone — even to visit a clinic. They are now banned from public parks, gyms, and protests; their very voices are policed.

The Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice law, approved by their leader in August 2024, formally declares women’s voices forbidden. Within four months of their takeover, Reporters Without Borders found that four out of every five women........

© Indian Express