Ashraf Ghani’s departure broke us: Afghan lawmaker Anarkali Kaur Honaryar

When a plane, with 168 passengers evacuated from Afghanistan, landed at Hindon airbase in Ghaziabad on Sunday,  Anarkali Kaur Honaryar heaved a sigh of relief. Honaryar, an Afghan member of Parliament who was among those evacuated, had lived a harrowing few hours after Taliban stormed Kabul and before she was airlifted to India.

“My father and family suffered under Taliban rule 20 years ago but it was different. Now they (Taliban) are stronger, and wouldn’t have allowed us to live there,” Honaryar told the Indian Express. She one of the first non-Muslim women to be elected to the country’s Upper House and has been a lawmaker close to 10 years now.

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Speaking about the few hours in the run up to her escape, Honaryar said that it was all so sudden that they didn’t know how to react. Initially she and her family thought they would be able to live in the trouble-torn country but when President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, they had no hope. “….we later found a video of him. I don’t know what happened but it broke all of us,” she told the newspaper.

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Everyone in the office was receiving calls about the Taliban seizing Kabul, she added. She quickly left her office, got into her car and started driving towards her home. That’s when she noticed noticed people running on the streets amid distant gunfire.

Such was the chaos that she could not even drive home, she then got off the car and started running. When she reached home, she was flooded with calls from family and friends asking her to leave the country. She said that the Taliban were very close to our house and she could hear gunshots. Initially she thought of shifting to a gurdwara but soon realized that may not be safe. That was when she decided to leave the country.

Another Indian origin lawmaker who arrived in India was Narender Singh Khalsa, who just could not believe what had happened to their country. “I feel like crying. Everything is finished. It is a very difficult and painful decision to leave the country. We have not seen such a situation. Everything has been snatched away. It’s all over,” Khalsa told PTI.

“All the achievements of the last 20 years in Afghanistan have been lost. Nothing is left. It’s zero now,” he added. He still hopes that he will be able to return to his home in kabul 

Alladad Qureshi, an Afghan national whose wife hails from Kashmir, expressed a sense of relief as he interacted with mediapersons at Hindon. “I have two daughters. We thank the Government of India, Modiji, MEA and air force for saving us,” he said.