The recent meeting between Rabab Fatima, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan and head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), and Vikram Misri, India’s Deputy Foreign Minister, on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, appears at first glance to be an ordinary diplomatic encounter. Under the current circumstances in Afghanistan, however, it may signal the continuation of India’s approach toward the country: support for the people of Afghanistan, maintaining contact with the international community, and making use of multilateral channels, without this support necessarily meaning direct involvement in Afghanistan’s political and security disputes. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has announced that in the meeting, Misri stressed the need for the international community to keep its attention on the humanitarian needs of the people of Afghanistan and expressed support for UNAMA’s role. Fatima, for her part, expressed appreciation for India’s support of the Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.
The significance of the meeting grows as Afghanistan is going through one of its most difficult humanitarian and regional periods. On one hand, economic restrictions, reduced foreign aid, and the mass return of migrants have increased pressure on Afghan society. On the other hand, relations between the Taliban regime and Pakistan in recent months have been marked by border clashes, the closure of crossings, and disruption to trade. In its report, the United Nations (UN) stressed that the clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan have had humanitarian, economic, and security consequences, and that the closure of borders has disrupted supply chains, raised transport costs, and made access to humanitarian aid more difficult.
In such circumstances, India’s role cannot be analyzed solely within the framework of its rivalry with Pakistan or New Delhi’s differences with the Taliban regime. Over the past five years, India has tried to keep a significant part of its engagement with Afghanistan centered on the people of Afghanistan, humanitarian aid, education, healthcare, and capacity building. An official MEA report shows that, after August 2021, New Delhi has also based its Afghanistan policy on historical ties, people-to-people contacts, and UN Security Council Resolution 2593. In education, since 2023 India has provided online scholarships to about 2,000 students from Afghanistan, including 580 girls, and has also continued agricultural training programs.
India’s humanitarian assistance has also been one of the most important tools of this approach. In the years since the fall of the Republic of Afghanistan, India has sent shipments of wheat, medicine, and other emergency aid to Afghanistan. According to official Indian government figures, the country pledged to send 50,000 tons of wheat to Afghanistan, and by August 2022, 40,000 tons of it had been delivered. Medical aid and health supplies were provided alongside it. In December 2025, Indian officials again stressed the continuation of health cooperation and the dispatch of equipment and medicine to Afghanistan.
This policy has another important aspect: India has tried to maintain its engagement with Afghanistan through multilateral channels. Support for UNAMA, cooperation with the UN, and participation in mechanisms related to landlocked countries allow New Delhi to approach the Afghanistan issue from more than the angle of a bilateral rivalry with Pakistan. India is one of the co-chairs of the “Group of Friends of Landlocked Developing Countries” (LLDCs) at the UN, a group whose goal is to strengthen international cooperation to reduce transit barriers, develop infrastructure, and improve landlocked countries’ access to global markets. At the group’s meetings in 2026, India’s representative has attended alongside Austria as co-chair.
This matter is of particular importance for Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a landlocked country, and its dependence on neighboring countries for trade, transit, and access to global markets has always been one of the structural vulnerabilities of its economy. In fact, the issue for Afghanistan is not only access to humanitarian aid. The main issue is creating sustainable and diverse routes for trade and transit. From this perspective, India’s role in the Group of Friends of LLDCs can go beyond direct assistance and, at the level of international policymaking, support the principle of free, predictable, and non-political access for landlocked countries to transit routes. In 2026, the UN also stressed the creation of new financial and infrastructural mechanisms for landlocked countries and the removal of obstacles to freedom of transit.
But the more important question is whether such a role can increase international pressure on Pakistan. The answer must be given with caution. India alone cannot, and probably will not, replace UN mechanisms or regional countries in managing relations between the Taliban and Pakistan. Nor is increased diplomatic pressure on Islamabad an automatic result of India’s cooperation with UNAMA or the Group of Friends of LLDCs. Nevertheless, India’s activity within these frameworks can help reinforce an important principle: disruption to trade and transit routes should not become a tool of pressure on the people of Afghanistan.
This issue has become even more important under current conditions. The recent clashes between the Taliban and Pakistan and the closure of borders have shown that Afghanistan’s dependence on one or a few limited routes can have serious economic and humanitarian consequences. The UN has also reported increased transport costs and disruption to trade and aid delivery as a result of tensions between the two sides. In such a situation, the more routes for trade and transit Afghanistan has at its disposal, the less its vulnerability to disruption on any one particular route.
This is where Chabahar and India’s role in connecting Afghanistan and Central Asia become significant. For years, India has supported the development of Iran’s Chabahar port as one of the alternative routes for Afghanistan’s access to regional markets. In the trilateral agreement between India, Iran, and Afghanistan, Chabahar was also presented as a route for providing Afghanistan with alternative access to regional markets. This route does not necessarily need to be defined in opposition to the Pakistan route. Rather, from an economic perspective, the existence of multiple routes can give Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries more choice and diversity.
Within this framework, India’s policy can be described as a form of multilayered diplomacy: humanitarian and educational assistance on one hand, support for UNAMA and UN mechanisms on the other, and, at the economic level, efforts to strengthen connectivity routes such as Chabahar. This approach allows India to play a part in shaping the regional environment around Afghanistan without becoming directly involved in the conflict between the Taliban and Pakistan.
Even so, the limits of this policy are also clear. India faces challenges related to security developments in Afghanistan, its relations with the Taliban regime, financial constraints, and the limited capacity of some transit routes. Chabahar also cannot replace the full capacity of the Pakistan routes in the short term. On the other hand, excessive pressure to turn the Afghanistan issue into an arena of India-Pakistan rivalry could itself lead to a more complicated regional environment.
Therefore, the significance of the meeting between Rabab Fatima and Vikram Misri lies less in any new political agreement than in the continuation of a diplomatic message: Afghanistan should not be forgotten amid regional rivalries, and the humanitarian and economic needs of its people must remain at the center of the international community’s attention. Through humanitarian aid, education, support for UNAMA, participation in the Group of Friends of LLDCs, and the development of alternative transit routes, India can play a role in this process. This role may indirectly affect Pakistan’s calculations as well, because the more options Afghanistan has for trade and transit, the less its dependence on any one particular route will be. But turning this capacity into effective diplomatic pressure on Pakistan will ultimately depend on cooperation among the UN, regional countries, and other international powers, as well as on real developments in relations between the Taliban and Islamabad.
You can read the Persian version of this analysis article here:
