The Darul Uloom Deoband on Saturday (October 12, 2025) asserted that there were no directives to keep women journalists away from covering the visit of Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to the seminary.
"There were no restrictions from the Afghan Foreign Minister's office about who would attend," Deoband PRO Ashraf Usmani, also the media in-charge of Mr. Muttaqi’s Saturday programme, told PTI, and dismissed as "baseless" claims that women journalists were kept away.
This followed a raging controversy over the absence of female journalists from a press conference of the visiting Afghan minister in New Delhi a day earlier, with the Opposition terming it as "unacceptable" and an "insult to women".
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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.
