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 cut open. On the far side stood more than a dozen people, among them women and children, driven to the spot by India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and told to start walking.
The BGB turned them back. A flag meeting was convened 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.
That image — families stranded between two nations that each refuse to claim them — says more about the present state of India-Bangladesh relations than any joint statement will. And it is no longer an isolated incident.
Bangladeshi border guards reported foiling 10 separate push-in attempts within a single 24-hour span in early June. Rights monitors in Dhaka have documented at least four Bangladeshis killed by India BSF fire in the first four months of this year, and four more in May alone — three by gunfire and one in custody — according to tallies kept by Ain o Salish Kendra and the Manabadhikar Shongskriti Foundation.
The frontier that the two governments have long wrapped in the language of friendship is now a killing field.
Kolkata’s toxic politics
Much of this has little to do with Bangladesh at all. In May, West Bengal backed its first BJP government, an administration that campaigned on identifying undocumented residents and removing them, a formula that does not distinguish cleanly between Indian citizens who lack paperwork and Bangladeshi migrants.
Land along the border is being handed to the BSF on a tight deadline to erect fencing. The force has also floated releasing crocodiles and venomous snakes in the riverine gaps that wire fencing cannot close.
The citizenship witch hunts, the “infiltrator” rhetoric and the even reptile-release proposal itself all carry the signature of New Delhi and its Home Minister Amit Shah. What the Bengal election result added is a fresh local engine for the state government to keep generating headlines about expulsion.
Kolkata’s toxic domestic politics are now being exported across a frontier that runs through some of the most densely populated, waterlogged terrain on Earth.
To be sure, Bangladesh’s own politics have shifted as well. Dhaka is now governed by an elected administration under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, not the interim government that ran the country for 18 months after Sheik Hasina’s fall and flight 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 push-ins are unacceptable.
Hasina’s 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 that owes part of its mandate to public memory of her deference, and that has branded its own foreign policy “Bangladesh First,” cannot afford to look passive now.
The legal architecture for handling all this already exists. Bilateral arrangements dating back decades, including the 2011 Coordinated Border Management Plan, require both sides to exchange verified lists of names, confirm nationality through agreed channels and return people only through designated crossing points.
What is happening instead is closer to expulsion by ambush. People are moved at night, often by force, with no list exchanged and no chance to contest a mistaken identity. Some of those pushed across are likely Bangladeshi.
Others, by credible accounts, are Indian citizens or long-settled Rohingya with no claim to Bangladeshi nationality at all. Treating a legal process as a logistics problem to be solved after midnight is how people end up dead in the water or stranded for days in the harsh open.
The killings deserve to be named plainly, rather than folded into a general complaint about migration management. The killing of 15-year-old Felani Khatun on the fence 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 unless it is matched by a commitment to investigate each death and publish what is found, rather than quietly closing the file without follow-up.
Talks without solution
This month’s director-general-level talks in New Delhi deserve to be taken seriously, but not mistaken for a solution. The 57th BGB-BSF conference produced commitments to coordinated patrols, real-time intelligence sharing and, notably, a joint pledge to investigate killings on both sides and act against those responsible.
Better coordination among the border forces can reduce confusion at the operational level and cut down on the chaotic crossings that get people killed. But a pledge to investigate is not the same as a published finding, and promises of exactly this kind have been made and shelved in the past.
Nor does any of it deal with the political incentive on the Indian side to keep generating chest-thumping headlines about deportations, because that incentive sits in Kolkata’s electoral calendar, not in any border-security manual.
Bangladesh’s demands on India should be specific, not symbolic. Every return should pass through a named, verifiable channel, with a list exchanged in advance, and movement only through a recognized crossing point rather than a gap in the fence, and never in the darkness of night.
Every killing should trigger a joint, time-bound inquiry with public results, not a routine note of regret. And Dhaka should connect conduct at the border to the things India actually wants from this relationship, such as transit access, water-sharing and trade, rather than treating border security as a sealed compartment that diplomacy elsewhere cannot touch.
Bangladesh can make these demands without hostility, negotiating from the position its own voters have given it — answerable to people who watched this putrid pattern play out for years and now expect something different and better.
A border that runs through paddy fields and river chars cannot be sealed by fencing alone, and pretending otherwise produces mainly dead bodies and stranded families, not fewer crossings.
The patrols agreement is a start. Whether it becomes anything more 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.
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