Women journalists were not barred during Afghan Foreign Minister’s Deoband event, says seminary

Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband clarified on Saturday that it had not issued any instructions barring women journalists from covering the visit of Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to the seminary.

Ashraf Usmani, PRO of Deoband and media in-charge for Muttaqi’s Saturday programme, clarified that the Afghan Foreign Minister’s office had placed no restrictions on attendance. He dismissed as “baseless” the allegations that women journalists were barred.

The clarification came after anguish over the absence of female reporters at a press conference addressed by the Afghan minister in New Delhi a day earlier, which the Opposition condemned as “unacceptable” and an “insult to women.”

The Editors Guild of India and the Indian Women Press Corps (IWPC) also termed the act as highly discriminatory and said it cannot be justified on grounds of diplomatic privilege under the Vienna Convention.

However, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had also distanced itself from any involvement in the press interaction held by the Afghan foreign minister in Delhi.

The Guild said that whether or not the MEA coordinated the event, “it is deeply troubling that such a discriminatory exclusion was allowed to proceed without objection”.

The barring of women journalists triggered widespread political uproar across the country. On Saturday, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to state his stand on the issue, describing it as “an affront to India’s women journalists.”

In a post on X, she wrote, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji, please clarify your position on the removal of female journalists from the press conference of the representative of the Taliban on his visit to India. If your recognition of women’s rights isn’t just convenient posturing from one election to the other, then how has this insult to some of India’s most competent women been allowed in our country, a country whose women are its backbone and its pride.”