A Silent War on the Bangladesh Border

There is a particular kind of tragedy that becomes invisible through repetition. Two Bangladeshis shot dead by India’s Border Security Force along the Batanbari border in Brahmanbaria. One of them is Morshalin, twenty-seven years old. The other still unidentified. Border Guard Bangladesh is working to recover the bodies.
By now, this sentence practically writes itself.
Between 2000 and 2020, at least 1,236 Bangladeshis were killed and 1,145 injured in BSF shootings, according to The Business Standard. In 2025 alone, 34 more, 24 shot, 10 tortured to death. Diplomatic meetings happened. Protest notes were filed. Commitments to bring the number to zero were made and quietly abandoned. The killing continued on schedule.
Felani Khatun — fifteen years old, shot in January 2011 while crossing with her father. Her body hung upside down in barbed wire for four hours while she begged for water. The trooper who shot her was acquitted. That single case, documented by Eurasia Review, contains everything you need to understand about how this border operates — who bears the cost, and who faces no consequence whatsoever. Human Rights Watch has found no known instance of BSF personnel being held accountable for border abuses. Not one. As The Daily Star observed, the BSF does not conduct itself this way on India’s borders with China or Pakistan nations it formally considers hostile. The shoot-first doctrine is applied exclusively along the Bangladesh frontier; with a country India publicly calls a friend and partner. That is not a security policy. That is a statement about how Bangladeshi lives are valued within Indian strategic thinking and that statement is unacceptable.
No diplomatic language softens what this actually is. When a former BSF Director General defended the killings by labelling victims as smugglers and criminals, he was claiming the right to execute foreign nationals without evidence, without trial, and without consequence, as The Business Standard reported. Responsible border governance the kind India claims to practice does not work that way. Every person killed at that border was a citizen of a sovereign nation. They deserved due process. They deserved to come home.
What Bangladesh also deserves is an honest conversation about why this border remains so dangerous for its own people not to dilute the case against BSF killings, but to strengthen the response to them. The illegal trade networks operating along this frontier drug trafficking, gold smuggling, informal cattle trading are run by organized networks that recruit from economically desperate border communities. The people standing at the wire, taking the risk, absorbing the violence, are never the ones profiting. They are the foot soldiers of operations that continue undisrupted regardless of how many individuals are shot. Dismantling those networks through serious domestic enforcement, economic investment in border communities, and genuine bilateral cooperation protects Bangladeshi lives far more effectively than any flag conference has managed to.
Bangladesh’s demand is straightforward and just that its citizens not be killed without consequence on a border shared with a country that claims friendship. That demand deserves to be heard, acted upon, and held to account. What has happened along this border for decades is not collateral damage. It is a pattern. And patterns do not end on their own.