With Tajikistan trapped in a Chinese debt trap and obliged to make security concessions favoring Beijing and its client state, Pakistan, the Narendra Modi administration must re-calibrate its relationship with Dushanbe.
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The administration of Narendra Modi's fast initiative to provide humanitarian aid and development cooperation to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by sending an official team to Kabul has shocked the Islamic Emirate's neighbors.
While the Indian team led by Afghan expert J P Singh is scheduled to return from Kabul today, it is inevitable that the Indian official meets with top Taliban leadership in the Afghan capital and discusses the next steps in moving bilateral collaboration further. The truth is that both parties were looking forward to the encounter, which came as a surprise to both Pakistan and China.
Because it has a strongly hostile relationship with the Sunni Pashtun army across the Amu Darya in Kabul, India's pragmatic engagement with the Taliban is anticipated to prompt a new policy from New Delhi towards Afghanistan's neighbor Tajikistan. Under its autocratic dictator, Emomali Rahmon, Tajikistan undertook military training along its roughly 1300 km border with Afghanistan following the Taliban's capture of Kabul with forces from the Russia-led Collective Security Organization.
Although India established a civilian hospital in Farkhor, Tajikistan, almost over the border from Afghanistan, in the 1990s to aid the local community as well as treat Northern Alliance fighters injured in Afghan civil strife, New Delhi should reevaluate its ties with Tajikistan as the latter has moved very close to Beijing in the past decade.
Tajikistan's debt is held by China, which is also its largest investor.
Tajikistan is plainly trapped in the Chinese debt trap since its economy is heavily built on remittances. As a result, it has made concessions to the Xi Jinping dictatorship, including allowing Beijing to utilize its military facility on its border with the restive Xinjiang province.
Dushanbe has enabled Chinese corporations to mine gold, silver, and other mineral ores in the Upper Kumarg goldfield in the Sughd province while being a backer of Chinese repressive tactics against the Sunni Muslim Uighur people in the Xinjiang area.
China is also constructing an airbase at Tashkurgan, which will definitely assist the PLA in monitoring any Uighur secessionist activities in the Wakhan Corridor, which runs along the China-Afghanistan-Tajikistan border.
Perhaps due to China's rising influence in Tajikistan and its service provider-client relationship with Pakistan, India only had a joint military air facility in name over the Afghan border, with Dushanbe yielding to Chinese and Russian demands.
Tajikistan was informed that China was concerned about Indian moves in Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Even though India has provided Tajikistan with aid, food, medication, vaccines, and humanitarian help throughout the years.
With the Northern Alliance slipping into Afghan history and the Belt-Road-Initiative debt trapping China in Tajikistan, India has to rethink its foreign policy goals in Dushanbe.
The Indian engagement with the Taliban might be the first move in this direction.