BSF’s Repeated Actions Along the Border Are Testing Bangladesh’s Friendship

There is a legal vocabulary for what happens along the India-Bangladesh frontier, and it is worth using precisely, because precision is what the debate keeps losing. When a state’s agents kill unarmed civilians outside a recognized theatre of conflict, the applicable standard under international human rights law is not self-defense as commonly understood in domestic criminal codes, but necessity and proportionality — force must be the last available option, and even then, calibrated to the threat actually posed. Nine Bangladeshis shot dead by India’s Border Security Force since January do not fit comfortably inside that standard, whatever language the BSF’s after-action reports use. Two died in Brahmanbaria’s Kasba upazila on May 8, one near Coachbehar on May 15, one more in Moulvibazar’s Kulaura upazila on June 12, a death that arrived one day after the two countries’ border forces had concluded four days of talks in New Delhi ostensibly aimed at preventing exactly this outcome.
What makes the pattern analytically significant, rather than merely tragic, is its persistence across changes in government on both sides of the border. Ain o Salish Kendra’s figures; 34 killed in 2025, 30 in 2024, 31 in 2023; span an interim technocratic administration in Dhaka and an elected one, a period in which Bangladesh’s foreign policy establishment shifted from unelected caretakers to a BNP government that campaigned explicitly on ending border killings. The continuity of the underlying practice, indifferent to who occupies Ganabhaban, suggests something closer to institutional doctrine on the Indian side than incidental excess. That doctrine found unusually candid articulation this year in a reported internal BSF communique, dated March 26, instructing field units to assess deploying snakes and crocodiles into riverine gaps where physical fencing has proven impractical, a proposal a former BSF director general himself dismissed as unable to distinguish nationality from intent, but one whose existence in writing indicates a security apparatus contemplating lethality as an engineering problem rather than a legal one.
The push-in question sits adjacent to this but is doctrinally distinct: it is a matter of state responsibility for the treatment of persons within a state’s jurisdiction, and of the customary prohibition on the forcible transfer of individuals across an international boundary absent due process. Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed’s disclosure to parliament on June 17, 2,369 people pushed across since August 2024, the overwhelming majority processed through Bangladeshi police stations rather than returned through any bilateral mechanism, describes a practice that treats an international border less as a demarcation of sovereignty than as a discretionary outlet for a domestic policy problem, namely West Bengal’s post-election “detect, delete, deport” campaign against alleged undocumented residents. That Rohingya and Myanmar nationals have been included among those pushed only sharpens the point: the border is being used to externalize a burden that international law generally assigns to the state where displaced persons are found, not to whichever neighbor happens to share a fence line. Bangladesh, notably, has continued to accept and process every individual verified as its own national through established channels, even as the volume of unverified transfers has grown.
The diplomatic record shows Bangladesh availing itself of every available instrument, the 57th BGB-BSF director general conference, parliamentary statements, a formal summons of India’s deputy high commissioner over a separate incident involving a prime ministerial adviser detained at Delhi airport, without yet securing the one outcome that would indicate the relationship is being taken seriously on both sides: a compensation mechanism for victims’ families, which Ahmed confirmed does not exist, and a verifiable reduction in fatalities, which the data does not show. The absence of the customary joint press conference at the June conference’s conclusion was a minor procedural detail, but diplomatic minutiae of that kind tend to register the actual temperature of a relationship more honestly than its communiqués do.
None of this is incidental to a bilateral friendship the size and history of the one Dhaka and New Delhi claim to share. A shared border exceeding four thousand kilometers, nearly a fifth of it still unfenced by necessity rather than choice, is either governed by mutual restraint or it is governed by whichever side holds the greater capacity for unilateral action and for the residents of Kurigram, Chapainawabganj, and Brahmanbaria, the answer to that question is being decided empirically, one border pillar at a time, rather than in any conference room.