On the night of May 31, near Sadipur in Jashore’s Sharsha upazila, Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) personnel found a section of the border fence open. On the far side stood more than a dozen people, among them women and children, postponed at the site by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) and told to start walking.
The BGB turned them back. A flag meeting was called between the two forces, but nothing was resolved. The desperate group spent the night in the strip of mud and wire that officials politely refer to as no man’s land.
This image – families trapped between two nations that each refuses to claim them – says more about the current state of India-Bangladesh relations than any joint statement. And it is no longer an isolated incident.
Bangladesh border guards announced malleability 10 separate push attempts within a single 24-hour span in early June. Rights monitors in Dhaka have documented at least four Bangladeshis killed by Indian BSF fire in the first four months of this year, and four more in May alone – three at gunpoint and one in custody – according to data kept by the Ain o Salish Kendra and the Manabadhikar Shongskriti Foundation.
The border that the two governments have long wrapped in the language of friendship is now a killing field.
The toxic politics of Calcutta
Much of this has little to do with Bangladesh. In May, West Bengal SUPPORT Her first BJP government, an administration that campaigned on identifying undocumented residents and deporting them, a formula that did not clearly distinguish between undocumented Indian citizens and Bangladeshi immigrants.
The land along the border is becoming submitted for the BSF on a tight deadline to erect the fence. There is also strength navigate releasing crocodiles and poisonous snakes into the gaps in the river that the barbed wire fence cannot close.
The citizenship witch hunt, the rhetoric of “infiltrating” and even the reptilian release proposal itself all carry SIGNING of New Delhi and its Home Minister Amit Shah. What the Bengal election result added is a new local engine for the state government to continue generating headlines regarding deportation.
Calcutta’s toxic domestic politics are now being exported across a border that runs through some of the most densely populated and polluted terrain on Earth.
Of course, Bangladesh’s own politics have also changed. Dhaka is now governed by a elected administration under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, not the interim government that ran the country for 18 months after Sheikh Hasina’s fall and departure to India.
A government in Dhaka elected in that politically charged aftermath carries a different kind of authority when it tells New Delhi that forced, unverified, nighttime pushes are unacceptable.
The Hasina administration was widely seen as deferential to India on these issues, and the quiet humiliations it absorbed at the border made the relationship increasingly corrosive at home.
A government which owes part of its mandate to the public memory of its honor and which has called its foreign policy “Bangladesh first,” can’t afford to look passive right now.
The legal architecture to deal with all this already exists. bilateral deal dating back decades, including the 2011 Coordinated Border Management Plan, requires both sides to exchange verified lists of names, confirm nationality through agreed channels and turn people back only through designated crossing points.
What is happening instead is closer to ambush deportation. People are moved at night, often by force, with no list exchanged and no opportunity to challenge a mistaken identity. Some of those pushed back are likely to be Bangladeshi.
Others, from reliable calculationare long-settled Indian or Rohingya nationals with no claim to Bangladeshi nationality. Treating a legal process as a logistical problem to be solved after midnight is how people end up dead in the water or stranded for days in the harsh environment.
The killings deserve to be clearly named, rather than included in a general complaint about migration management. of killing of 15-year-old Felani Khatun on the barbed wire in 2011 became a symbol precisely because it exposed a pattern rather than an aberration – one that has outlasted every government in Dhaka since.
An agreement on patrols and intelligence sharing, however welcome, will do nothing for accountability if it is not matched by a commitment to investigate every death and publish what is found, rather than quietly closing the file without follow-up.
Conversations without solutions
This month’s director-general-level talks in New Delhi deserve to be taken seriously, but not mistaken for a solution. 57th BGB-BSF conference produced commitments to coordinated patrols, real-time intelligence sharing and, especially, a joint hostage to investigate the killings by both sides and act against those responsible.
Better coordination between border forces can reduce confusion at the operational level and cut down on chaotic and deadly crossings. But a promise to investigate is not the same as a published finding, and promises of this kind have been just that made and placed on the shelf in the past.
None of them deal with the political drive on the Indian side to continue generating sensational headlines about deportations, because that drive is found in Calcutta’s electoral calendar, not in some border security handbook.
Bangladesh’s demands on India should be specific, not symbolic. Any return must go through a named, verifiable channel with a list exchanged in advance, and move only through a known crossing point and not a gap in the fence and never in the dark of night.
Every killing should prompt a joint, time-bound investigation with public results, not a routine sorry note. And Dhaka needs to tie border behavior to the things India actually wants from the relationship, such as transit access, water sharing and trade, rather than treating border security as a closed compartment that diplomacy elsewhere cannot touch.
Bangladesh can make these demands without hostility, negotiating from the position its voters have given it – responding to people who have seen this rotten model play out for years and now expect something different and better.
A border that straddles plains and river candy can’t be fenced off alone, and claiming otherwise produces mostly dead bodies and stranded families, no less crossings.
The patrols agreement is a start. Whether anything more is done will depend on whether Dhaka treats the border as a measure of how seriously India takes Bangladesh’s sovereignty, and says so publicly and repeatedly every time it sits down with New Delhi — not just when someone dies in the mud between their two fences.
Md Obaidullah is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar in the Department of Development Studies at Daffodil International University, Dhaka. His academic work has appeared in Routledge, Springer Nature and SAGE. He regularly contributes to Asia Times, The Diplomat, East Asia Forum, Modern Diplomacy, The Business Standard, Daily Observer, New Age and Dhaka Tribune.
