“It is all propaganda. We have Sharia there and everybody has rights,” reiterated Amir Khan Muttaqi, the visiting Taliban foreign minister of the Emirate of Afghanistan, tossing aside the question on women’s rights violations. As if to clinch the matter, Muttaqi trotted out the improvement in the security situation. “Before August 2021 there were at least 200-400 deaths every day. Today they have stopped. Have you seen any protests taking place? No, people are happy”, he insisted at the all-male press conference in the contested Afghanistan Embassy in Delhi. India, driven by realist strategic interests, is poised to upgrade diplomatic relations and is fast sliding towards legitimating the Taliban’s order in Afghanistan. Also read: Engagement Can’t Be Endorsement: Six Problems With Modi Government’s Taliban EmbraceExpendable is the pull of humanitarian morality and gender justice that once drove India’s advocacy in multilateral fora to respect the human rights of all Afghans and especially women, children and minorities. Shifting regional power equations have produced a tempting convergence between Afghanistan and India against “cross border terrorism”, implicitly targeting common ‘enemy’ Pakistan. The Taliban government was singular in supporting India’s military action, Operation Sindoor, against Pakistan. Add to that the turn in geo-political developments which find Russia and China engaged with the Taliban and India joining them to oppose US President Trump’s bid to reclaim the former American Bagram air base in Afghanistan.For India’s moral ‘soft power’ stature and international status as ‘Global South’ leader and stalwart of the values of the international order, it is then inconvenient that the high profile visit of the Taliban leader coincided with the UN Human Rights Council’s establishment of an Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan. The mechanism will document the truth of human rights violations and complement accountability processes at the International Criminal Court. Already, the Ministry of External Affairs, embarrassed by the uproar against their gender exclusionary conference, persuaded the Taliban to convene a more gender inclusive press conference, the next day. On gender discrimination, the Taliban speak was the same: “We have not declared it (girls education) haram, but it has been postponed.” However, as India’s diplomatic legitimation of the Taliban intensifies, the embarrassment of being a moral outlier will intensify especially as the global campaign against Gender Apartheid gains urgency for its inclusion as a Crime Against Humanity in the Draft Convention, 2017. India will need to gloss over the revelation of fact after fact in detailed field accounts about egregious human rights violations in Afghanistan, that the Taliban dismissed as “propaganda” or that an end to public violence means an end to the “fear anxiety and insecurity” choking the personal lives of Afghans. It will also need to ignore that the Taliban’s defensive claim of 2.8 million girls in school refers to Afghanistan’s proliferating network of madrassas. Public protests stopped after women protestors were arrested, tortured and forcibly disappeared, but the resistance continues, covertly. Also read: Should India’s Realpolitik Shift Mean Abandoning Afghan Women by Legitimating Taliban Rule?All that and more is empirically evidenced in a new report by the Afghan organisation FARAGEER, released in September at the UN in New York, as an urgent call to action. Titled ‘Echoes of Alarm: Afghan Women’s Stories of Gender Apartheid and Looming Threat of Religious Extremism’, it is a hybrid study with rare access to 600+ Afghan women across 14 of the country’s 34 provinces and backed by in-depth interviews. It reveals why extreme gender hierarchies and a restrictive gender order matter so vitally in the ideology, practices and maintenance of the Islamic Emirate regime. The report takes us behind the towering walls which hide, silence and cage Afghan women, and through their stories it reveals the lived, everyday politics of surviving the nexus between gender and extremism which legitimates violence against women/girls in the street and in the home. Co-authored by Rita Manchanda and Ananya Kundu, the study reveals the centrality of women’s subjugation in the Islamic Emirate’s political project of social control and regime maintenance in multi-ethnic Afghanistan’s fractured field of power. The ultra-conservative Taliban power elite, like all other extremist fundamentalist groups, politically instrumentalise the position of women’s rights as one of the main threats to religion and moral corruption to rally public support.It posits that the Taliban are less concerned about winning popular legitimacy and international acceptance through inclusive representation or by tackling the economic crisis, and more with entrenching the political project of social control to keep intact the loyalty of their followers and fighters.Four years after the Taliban’s lightning takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the study crashes the group’s empty rhetoric about the ‘temporary’ nature of restrictions, especially the ban on girls’ education. It reveals a systemic interlocking architecture of law, regulation and practice of gender persecution to maintain social control of the Afghan family. The relentless daily rollout of more than 100 restrictive decrees have systematically stripped women of rights and humanity. A mullah (Muslim clergy) in a local mosque is quoted by a woman from Bamyan saying, “Women and dogs are alike in character and women will never enter paradise”. Illusions about Taliban’s claim of “postponing” loosening restrictions, collapsed with the promulgation of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) law in 2024. The PVPV law intensifies the system of extreme gender hierarchies and punitively enforced exclusions in a legal system of subjectively determined and vaguely formulated offences. It widens social control by bringing in family members, service providers and the community as accountable for women’s violations, and unleashes the ubiquitous and intrusive morality police, the Amr-bil- Maruf. Their misogynist prejudices and moods decide who or what was a violation, and with impunity they can kill women who dared to talk back.A women’s rights activist from Laghman narrated the story of a woman waiting in line to get her Tazkira (Identity Card), anxious at the delay as her daughter was in hospital. She requested the Taliban officer to allow her to get ahead in the line. He brusquely warned her and reportedly said, “Those women who talk back to us, we kill them.” She had dared to speak back and was shot in the heart. …The Taliban official was not punished.Discriminatory decrees and punitively enforced regulations have blocked girls’ access to education after 6th grade. Women are banned from working, deepening economic distress. The health sector is the only option available but with medical education banned, Afghans are looking at the intergenerational crisis of no women doctors/nurses being available. Women’s physical presence in public space is erased, their voice silenced, their authored books removed. Also read: ‘No, No, No, Unequivocally No, It’s Not Fitting for Democratic India to Invite the Taliban FM’Mobility outside the home is discouraged and stigmatised as loitering, and allowed only with a mahram (male family chaperone). Couples are humiliated and made to produce their marriage certificate, women shamed for inappropriate hijab; women and men are beaten and arrested by morality police. Imprisoned within homes with darkened windows, schooling blocked, their income earning capacity and potential lost, wives and sisters have been stripped of respect and face rising levels of domestic violence. Here are two survey respondents’ accounts:“My sister’s husband has beaten her several times, and boldly asserts, ‘this is the time of the Taliban, none will hear your voice now.”“I lost my job and had no income. Before I was dismissed, my husband treated me very well, but after the Emirate took over, he started behaving very aggressively. I now spend most of my time living at my father’s house.”It is the blocking of education that rankles most with Afghan women (and men). Girls see their future narrowed to the single prospect of forced and early marriage. There is an epidemic of mental distress among girls leading to a gender disproportionate rise in suicides. Strikingly, in barely two decades of the Afghan Republic, a desire for education seems to have taken root in large parts of the country, not just in the cities but also in many villages and across ethnicities, even among Pashtuns. Families who had never sent their daughters to school, identify the ban on higher education as the principal problem facing Afghanistan. The Islamic basis of the restriction is questioned: “Discrimination is unacceptable in Islam,” majority of the respondents asserted.“Afghans are willing to accept the compulsions of wearing Hijab, and having a Mahram, but they really value education. If the Taliban provides education, women are willing to put up with other things. This is the fundamental right everyone now wants to have.”Taliban has proved the most unyielding of women’s rights as the key manifestation of their ‘paak’ Islamic faith. Yet, whether for appeasement or indoctrination, the Taliban is laying out the welcome mat for girls in madrassas. In Mazhar and Balkh, more girls are going to madrassas than boys. The report highlights the paradox of the Taliban shutting down schools, colleges and training institutes for young women, but fast tracking the expansion of the madrassa network for girls, with age no bar, and male teachers no inhibitor.Mothers surveyed, raised alarm about the production of radical and violent Taliban cadres that will do harm within Afghanistan and outside. The changed education curriculum in madrassas aims to propagate the Taliban’s extremist beliefs and reminds that the Taliban have been using the madrassas as a means to inculcate extremist ideas and beliefs in boys and girls and to indoctrinate more foot soldiers, spies and supporters of its regime.What adds to anxiety is the fear that they are modelled on the Pakistani qawmi madrassas and inculcate an extreme version of political Islam. It was in such madrassas near the Afghan border that the Afghan mujahideen and indeed the early generation of Talib refugees in Pakistan, were indoctrinated. “Young brothers are going to Madrasas, and on returning home, they tell their parents to stop the girls of the family from working and studying. In one case the brother stabbed his sister 8 times because she did not obey the new rules. He was trying to stop her from going to school.”Indoctrination into the misogynist ideology of the Taliban is not limited to boys and young men, but also young women. Schooled in madrassas in Kabul, women were used to outflank the women’s protest movement “Bread, Work, Freedom”, and to show that women supported the Taliban. These women are active on social media space and post intolerant observations about wearing ‘free clothing’ or a thin hijab.The study shows that the Taliban’s First Emirate (1996-2001) and Second Emirate (2021-) are paradigmatic of violent extremist movements that combine the aggressive propagation of an Islamic system of governance and manipulation of the ethno-cultural communities’ existing unequal gender power relations and cultural narratives to validate their actions and their rule. Afghan scholar Ibrahimi succinctly describes the Taliban‘s hybrid political mix as combining “a fundamentalist interpretation of religion with a particular form of exclusionary Pashtun ethno-nationalism”. Within Afghanistan’s medieval theocracy, the study identifies the curious mix of influential illiterate clerics and savvy ideologues and technocrats. This is evidenced in the Taliban’s ideological construct of its push back against women’s rights as a push back against neo-colonial western oppression as articulated in the compulsory educational text on Violence Against Women in Emirate Studies. It asserts that “the issue of women’s liberation from the colonial era is considered one of the most important weapons of the West”. It is because the Taliban directly challenge the lawless system of the West, that the enemies of Islam [liberal western society] accuse the Islamic Emirate of “violating women’s rights”. A primary finding of the study is that despite the Taliban’s intensive and multi-mode onslaught of religious propaganda and the faith-saturated socio-cultural environment, many voiced scepticism about the Taliban’s piety and interpretation of Islam: “forced piety cannot be sustained”. “What the Talibs claim to be Islamic often is not aligned with the true teachings of the Quran or the Prophet.” “Religion has nothing to do with it. It is politics.”The Taliban group has successfully flattened militant resistance and public protests, but covert resistance in the private space continues in spite of an Orwellian surveillance system. Resistance is led by women. Arguably, just as the Taliban regime is built upon women’s oppression, the opposition to women’s oppression is the terrain on which resistance is mobilised. Women across Afghanistan participate in online protests, twitter storms, hashtag campaigns, fireside chats and webinars, aided by diaspora networks. On prohibited festivals like Shab-e-Yalda and Nowruz, young women, defiant, upload photos of their celebration on social media. A viral viral of a protest was that of two burqa-clad sisters singing in protest of the Vice and Virtue law. It was picked up by a number of news platforms. Protests and advocacy continues through resilient coalitions such as the Afghan Women’s Protest Movements Coalition (AWPMC). However, the report also sounds the despair of Afghan women as they confront the international community’s abandonment of the women of Afghanistan in their continuing struggle.Rita Manchanda is a scholar and activist.