Readers’ comments: Male journalists should have boycotted Taliban minister’s press conference

Thank you, Moska, for an insightful article contrasting the Taliban with Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwala’ (“When a Taliban minister invokes Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwala’: An Afghan imagines the poet’s quiet response”). It was thought-provoking and truthful to the core. The contrast between the two Afghans can not be greater. – Malcolm R Printer

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This is a thoughtful and timely essay. The travesty of the Talibani presence on Indian soil could perhaps be somewhat justified in the context of the quicksand of realpolitik and the geopolitics of the moment. We are trying to survive and operate among forces much larger than just the Afghan-India equation. But nothing justifies the acquiescence to the terms of the press conference. The exclusion of women was unacceptable. Male journalists should have boycotted the conference. As for the Taliban minister evoking Tagore’s timeless classic, the writer has said all that needs to be said in prose and poetry. What more can one add? Thank you for publishing this. – Radha Biswas

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Reports said that women journalists were conspicuously absent at a press conference addressed by the Taliban administration’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in New Delhi, ostensibly because the visiting Taliban contingent refused to permit women journalists to cover their press meet (“Women journalists complain they were barred from...

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