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India condemns Taliban decree
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 21
India today strongly deplored the Taliban regime’s reported decree imposing a separate dress code for Hindus in Afghanistan saying that it “patently discriminates against minorities”.

“We absolutely deplore such orders which patently discriminate against minorities,” a spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs said here in response to a question about the Taliban’s reported order asking Hindu women to wear a yellow cloth and Hindu households to hang a two-metre yellow cloth outside their houses for easy identity.

The decree prohibits Hindus and Muslims from living in the same house, bars Hindus from constructing new prayer houses or places of worship and asks Hindu men to stop donning turbans.

“We have learnt that the Taliban have issued an order imposing fresh restrictions on Hindus in Afghanistan,” the spokesman said and pointed out that “it is evidence further of the backward and unacceptable ideological underpinnings of the Taliban and justifies the action that the international community has taken in imposing sanctions against the Taliban.”

In December last year, India, Russia, the USA, Tajikstan and other countries had co-sponsored a resolution No. 1333 which was adopted by the UN Security Council clamping sanctions against the Taliban.