Javed Akhtar didn’t hold a press conference. He didn’t craft a clever tweet thread. He just said six words:

“I hang my head in shame.”  

And in those six words, he captured what most Indians felt but didn’t say out loud that sinking discomfort of watching Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi being received with respect on Indian soil.

Because let’s not dress it up,  the Taliban isn’t some misunderstood government. It’s a regime that turned girls into ghosts, books into threats, and freedom into blasphemy. Yet there he was, welcomed with courtesy, touring Darul Uloom Deoband, the historic Islamic seminary in Uttar Pradesh, as if the past twenty years hadn’t happened.

The Reception That Sparked Outrage

Muttaqi’s visit was more than diplomatic formalities, it was performance. And every performance has its symbols.

At Deoband, he was received reverently. Photos circulated. Smiles exchanged. It looked less like diplomacy and more like validation. The same Taliban that once bombed schools for girls now walked through a campus that has, for generations, shaped Islamic scholarship in India.

For Javed Akhtar, a man who’s consistently called out both Hindu and Muslim extremism, it wasn’t about faith. It was about memory. The memory of what the Taliban did to education, to art, to women. And the bitter irony that an Indian seminary, one built on learning, would bow to those who burned the idea of learning itself.

When Women Were Shut Out, Again

Then came the other irony: women journalists were barred from covering Muttaqi’s Delhi engagement. Officials said it was a “technical issue.” Because, of course, misogyny is never ideological, just “technical.”

That excuse didn’t fool anyone. The optics were brutal: India, a country that prides itself on women-led missions to Mars, accidentally echoing the Taliban’s gender apartheid. If diplomacy is theatre, this scene was a Freudian slip.

Deoband’s Welcome: Dialogue or Endorsement?

To be fair, Darul Uloom Deoband has the right to host whoever it wants. Dialogue, even with the uncomfortable, is part of democracy. But there’s a chasm between dialogue and deference.

When an institution that stands for scholarship offers warmth to a man who outlawed girls’ classrooms, it’s not conversation, it’s contradiction. Deoband’s gesture may have been meant as cultural diplomacy, but it played out like moral confusion.

Javed Akhtar’s reaction wasn’t against Deoband’s faith. It was against its selective empathy. You can’t talk about empowerment on Friday and applaud oppression on Saturday.

India’s Diplomatic Dilemma

India’s position is admittedly tricky. We haven’t recognized the Taliban government officially, yet we can’t ignore Afghanistan’s geopolitical reality either. Diplomacy demands engagement. But engagement doesn’t require erasing the difference between necessity and endorsement.

India could’ve spoken to Muttaqi quietly, pragmatically, even reluctantly. Instead, the optics turned it into a photo-op that screamed tolerance without principle. The kind of tolerance that flatters the oppressor and forgets the oppressed.

The Power of Saying “Shame”

That’s why Akhtar’s words sting. Because shame, in a time of constant spin, feels almost radical. To be ashamed means you still recognize the gap between what is and what should be.

He’s not saying “never engage.” He’s saying: don’t lose your moral language in the process. Don’t act like reverence is a strategy. Don’t invite someone who erased women from life and then quietly erase women from the room.

Akhtar’s “shame” isn’t self-pity. It’s resistance. A reminder that conscience is the one thing diplomacy can’t outsource.

The Real Message Behind the Outrage

India’s strength has always been its contradictions, secular yet spiritual, modern yet traditional. But some contradictions break, not balance. Welcoming a Taliban minister while sidelining women journalists isn’t nuanced. It’s negligence.

Javed Akhtar’s statement didn’t divide India; it reminded it what unity should feel like  discomfort at injustice, not silence in the face of it. Because shame isn’t weakness. Shame is the body’s alarm system for the soul. And if we stop feeling it, we stop being who we claim to be.