In contemporary geopolitical commentary, the specter of a large-scale military conflict between India and Bangladesh occasionally resurfaces, sometimes as a product of genuine security anxiety, and other times as inflammatory political rhetoric. Yet, while absolute certainty is a luxury foreign to international politics, a cold calculus of South Asian strategic realities reveals that a large-scale Indian invasion of Bangladesh remains highly improbable. Modern warfare has repeatedly demonstrated that raw firepower does not automatically translate into a successful occupation, nor does occupation guarantee strategic gain. For any decision-maker in New Delhi, regardless of bilateral tensions, a military campaign across the border represents one of the least rational options available.
The primary obstacle to any hostile outside force is Bangladesh’s underappreciated, defender-biased geography. The nation sits atop the world’s largest river delta, a labyrinthine network of thousands of rivers, floodplains, and wetlands that severely restricts the mobility of heavy armor and mechanized supply convoys. During the monsoon season, this terrain transitions from challenging to treacherous; flooding washes out infrastructure, degrades lines of communication, and transforms the landscape into an operational nightmare for an army unfamiliar with its fluid dynamics. Compounding this is the topography of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which provides an ideal environment for protracted defensive and asymmetric operations.
Furthermore, military planners must account for the human element: population density and national consciousness. Housing over 170 million people within a highly compact territory, Bangladesh presents a recipe for unsustainable urban and guerrilla resistance. For Bangladeshis, sovereignty is not an abstract legal concept but a visceral component of national identity forged in the crucible of the 1971 Liberation War. Any foreign encroachment would inevitably trigger a massive mobilization of civil networks, ensuring that an invading force would face a hostile population capable of disrupting intelligence and logistics indefinitely. This resistance would be anchored by the Bangladesh Armed Forces, which have undergone two decades of steady modernization, enhancing their defensive, maritime, and airspace capabilities to impose severe, compounding costs on an adversary from day one.
From a defensive standpoint, India’s own geopolitical environment strongly discourages the opening of a new theater. New Delhi is already burdened with a complex, multi-front security matrix. To the west lies a volatile relationship with Pakistan, characterized by persistent cross-border friction and the long-standing dispute over Kashmir. To the north, a heavily militarized, unresolved border dispute with China across Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh demands continuous strategic focus and resource allocation. For India to entangle its forces in Bangladesh would be to court catastrophic strategic overextension, a vulnerability that Beijing and Islamabad would be highly likely to exploit through synchronized pressure on India’s existing fronts.
Crucially, India faces a severe internal chokepoint: the Siliguri Corridor. This narrow strip of land, colloquially known as the “Chicken’s Neck,” serves as the solitary overland artery connecting mainland India to its northeastern “Seven Sisters” states. The vulnerability of this corridor means that maintaining a stable, predictable relationship with Bangladesh is a structural necessity for Indian territorial integrity. Any major conflict in the delta would instantly reverberate across the Northeast, exacerbating localized ethnic tensions, threatening vital supply lines, and destabilizing a region that already requires delicate federal management.
Beyond regional dynamics, Bangladesh’s rising economic and maritime weight has integrated it deeply into the global architecture. Situated at the northern apex of the Bay of Bengal, the country sits at the geopolitical crossroads of South and Southeast Asia, a critical junction in the broader Indo-Pacific strategy. Major global actors, including the United States, China, Japan, and the European Union, hold expanding commercial and strategic stakes in Bangladesh. Any unilateral military action by India would immediately spark a high-level international political crisis, inviting severe global backlash, diplomatic isolation, and a rapid flight of foreign capital that would derail India’s aspirations of being recognized as a responsible global leader.
Ultimately, the most damning argument against an invasion is the total absence of a strategic prize. India holds no territorial claims over Bangladesh, nor are there resources or geographic assets that New Delhi cannot more efficiently access through trade and diplomacy. History offers no parallel here; the unique humanitarian and geopolitical variables of 1971 bear no resemblance to the realities of a modern, sovereign Bangladeshi state fully integrated into international economic systems.
For Dhaka, the strategic mandate remains clear: continue to fortify its national position by diversifying global partnerships, modernizing its defense architecture, and maintaining a fiercely independent, balanced foreign policy. An invasion of Bangladesh would not be a victory for an aggressor; it would be a costly, self-inflicted trap, a strategic reality that ensures it remains highly unlikely.
There is a particular sleight of hand that recurs in subcontinental political discourse whenever minority rights are raised across the India-Bangladesh axis. The moment temple attacks in Bangladesh enter the conversation, they are deployed not as a humanitarian concern demanding accountability but as a rhetorical instrument a way of deflecting scrutiny from what Muslims in India have been living through. Equivalence is asserted. The conversation is neutralized. And both minorities are quietly abandoned in the process.
The equivalence does not survive contact with evidence.
The most elementary problem is one of scale, and it is so large that it should give any serious analyst pause before the comparison is even attempted. India’s Muslim population exceeds 220 million, a figure larger than Bangladesh’s entire population. The Hindu community in Bangladesh numbers somewhere between 14 and 15 million, constituting roughly 7% of the country. To invoke these two communities as symmetrical minorities, equally persecuted, equally deserving of parallel condemnation, is not comparative analysis. It is arithmetic evasion.
But the more consequential asymmetry is not numerical. It is structural.
Hindus in Bangladesh occupy a position within the state’s institutional architecture that is, by most available measures, stronger than their demographic share would predict. Estimates of their representation across the civil service, judiciary, and learned professions place them significantly above that 7% baseline, in some sectors, between 20 and 25%. Durga Puja is not a quietly tolerated observance; it is a nationally visible celebration, covered extensively by state and private media alike, supported by administrative security arrangements. More tellingly, no legislative or judicial process in Bangladesh has ever placed a Hindu citizen’s right to belong, their fundamental claim to nationality, under formal contestation. Whatever vulnerabilities the community faces, and they are real, they exist within a framework that does not interrogate their citizenship.
In India, that framework has itself become the problem.
The Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens did not emerge from a vacuum. They arrived in a political climate already shaped by years of documented hostility toward Muslim identity in public space, harassment over dietary practice, coercion around religious expression, the long shadow of Babri Masjid’s demolition and the judicial and political treatment that followed. What the CAA-NRC framework added was something categorically more serious: the legislative possibility that Muslim citizenship could be made conditional in ways that the citizenship of no other community could. The scale of the response; Shaheen Bagh, mass mobilizations across every major Indian city, was not disproportionate. It was a rational reaction to a structural threat.
The institutional data reinforces what the political record suggests. Muslim representation in India’s elite administrative and police services has remained stubbornly between 3 and 5%, against a population share of 15%. This disproportion has persisted across decades and across governments of varying ideological orientations. It is not an anomaly or an oversight. It is a pattern and patterns of this duration reflect something embedded in the architecture of the state itself.
To raise these facts is not to argue that Hindus in Bangladesh face no hardship. Attacks on temples have occurred and been documented. Land appropriation, social intimidation, and episodes of communal violence are part of the community’s lived experience, and the Bangladeshi state’s obligation to protect its minority citizens is a serious one that admits no equivocation. Acknowledging this is not a concession to the deflection argument, it is what intellectual honesty requires.
What intellectual honesty equally requires is the refusal to treat these two situations as morally or structurally equivalent. One community confronts vulnerability of a social and physical kind, within a constitutional order that does not dispute its belonging. The other confronts that vulnerability and, increasingly, the more corrosive anxiety of wondering whether the state itself regards it as fully, unambiguously a part of the nation it inhabits.
That is not the same predicament. Insisting that it is does not protect either minority. It produces a symmetry of rhetoric that serves only those who prefer that neither question be answered.
Population Reality
Muslims in India constitute one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. According to India’s 2011 official census, Muslims made up 15% of the country’s population, which today is estimated at more than 220-230 million people.
In contrast, Hindus in Bangladesh make up around 7% of the population, numbering approximately 14-15 million people.
In other words, the Muslim population of India is larger than the entire population of Bangladesh. Therefore, their social, political, and cultural presence would naturally be expected to be much greater.
Religious Freedom and Religious Practice
In Bangladesh, Hindus openly celebrate Durga Puja, Janmashtami, Rath Yatra, Kali Puja, Saraswati Puja and other religious festivals. These events receive security support from the state and administration and are widely covered at the national level.
Muslims in India also freely perform prayers, celebrate Eid, undertake Hajj, and operate madrasa education and religious activities. However, in recent years, controversies over the hijab, mosque-temple disputes, objections to the call to prayer (Azan), cow-related issues, and debates centered around religious identity have created concerns within the Muslim community.
Representation and Participation in the Mainstream
One important indicator of the actual condition of a minority community is its participation in the mainstream institutions of the state and society.
Although Hindus constitute around 7-8% of Bangladesh’s population, they have a significant presence in education, medicine, engineering, law, business, universities, the civil service, judiciary, and police. Various studies suggest that minority representation in some levels of the civil service, judiciary, and police ranges between 12-15%, which is nearly double their share of the population. In some professions, their participation is estimated to be as high as 20-25%.
Many secretaries, judges, police officers, doctors, teachers, industrialists, and cultural figures in Bangladesh come from the Hindu community.
On the other hand, although Muslims constitute about 15% of India’s population, their representation in the administration, police, judiciary, and other policy-making institutions has long been lower than their population share. Various studies have found that Muslim representation in the IAS, IPS, and higher government services remains around 3-5%, which is significantly lower than their population proportion—roughly one-fifth of what it would be if representation matched population size.
As a result, Hindus in Bangladesh appear to be comparatively overrepresented in many state and professional sectors relative to their population share, while Muslims in India remain underrepresented in several key state institutions despite being a much larger community.
Security of Places of Worship and Religious Sites
The demolition of the Babri Mosque in India was not merely the destruction of a building; it was a historic turning point that had a long-term impact on the sense of security among Indian Muslims. Since then, legal and political disputes surrounding several mosques, along with cases of mosque demolition or eviction, have attracted international attention.
In Bangladesh, incidents of attacks, vandalism, and arson targeting temples have occurred and are certainly concerning. However, there is no comparable example of a major historic temple being removed or demolished with direct state or court backing. In most cases, the authorities have stated that action would be taken against those responsible.
Citizenship and the State’s Approach
This is perhaps the most significant difference between the two situations.
The controversy surrounding the CAA and NRC in India emerged largely because many Muslims feared that citizenship verification processes could place them at greater risk. Many analysts viewed this as a form of structural pressure on Muslims. The nationwide protests, including the famous Shaheen Bagh movement, were fundamentally driven by concerns over citizenship and equal rights.
In Bangladesh, there has been no comparable state-level debate regarding the citizenship or constitutional status of Hindus. A Hindu citizen does not face the prospect of losing recognition as a Bangladeshi because of his or her religious identity.
Social Behavior and Public Space
Over the last decade, international media have documented numerous incidents in India involving Muslims being forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram,” being harassed over allegations of possessing or consuming beef, or being targeted because of their religious identity. These incidents do not represent the behavior of all Indians, but they are real and documented occurrences.
In Bangladesh, incidents of attacks, intimidation, and harassment against Hindus have occurred. However, there is no widespread, organized national pattern of forcing Hindus to recite Islamic declarations of faith, compelling religious conversion, or systematically forcing religious slogans upon them.
Protests, Assemblies, and Political Activism
In Bangladesh, Hindu groups have organized public rallies, human chains, demonstrations, and protests on issues related to minority rights, security, representation, and specific incidents. Such events generally take place openly.
Muslims in India also organize protests. However, the experience of the anti-CAA and anti-NRC movements demonstrated that large-scale Muslim-centered political protests often face greater political controversy, security scrutiny, and state response.
Media, Rumors, and Narrative Warfare
When attacks against Hindus occur in Bangladesh, a section of the Indian media often presents them as representative of the overall situation in Bangladesh.
Conversely, incidents involving discrimination or actions against Muslims in India are frequently explained as matters of law enforcement, removal of illegal structures, or local disputes, with less attention given to broader patterns and trends.
As a result, both countries experience not only real incidents but also competing narratives and information battles.
New Delhi wants the world to believe what happened to Dr Zahed Ur Rahman at Indira Gandhi International Airport was a paperwork issue. Nearly two and a half hours held at immigration, while the rest of his delegation walked through without incident, was apparently just routine screening. Nobody outside South Block actually believes that, and nobody should pretend to.
Dr Zahed is not a private citizen. He is the Adviser to Bangladesh’s Prime Minister on Policy and Strategy Affairs, and on Information and Broadcasting, leading his country’s official delegation to a meeting convened by India’s own Ministry of External Affairs. His visit was formally communicated in advance through a diplomatic note verbale. His government had done everything right. India still chose to make him wait.
The “computer glitch” defense does not survive contact with the facts. A flagged name, a routine check, an unfortunate coincidence, these are the excuses of an establishment that has been caught being petty and is now looking for cover. If this were truly administrative, the rest of the Bangladeshi delegation would not have cleared the same checkpoint without a hitch while their delegation leader was left standing for hours. Bureaucratic errors do not selectively target the one official whose government no longer takes orders from Delhi.
That is the real story here, and Delhi knows it. This is the same establishment that spent over a decade comfortable with a Dhaka that asked few questions and caused fewer problems. That arrangement ended last year. Bangladesh removed a government that had outsourced its spine, and what followed was not chaos, it was clarity. A country of 170 million people reasserted that its foreign policy answers to its own citizens, not to its largest neighbor’s preferences. Delhi has not metabolized that yet, and an immigration desk became the venue for its sulking.
To his credit, Dr Zahed did not swallow it quietly. When Indian officials offered, belatedly, to let him through, he declined and flew home through Colombo rather than accept an entry stamp on those terms. That is exactly the posture Dhaka has been missing for years. For too long, Bangladesh’s instinct was to absorb every slight quietly and call it diplomacy. Those days are over, and Delhi will need to get used to dealing with a neighbor that no longer performs gratitude for basic respect.
Dhaka’s response so far, summoning the Deputy High Commissioner and registering “deep disappointment,” is the correct first step and nothing more. A diplomatic note is not a deterrent. If Delhi believes a polite protest is the ceiling of Bangladesh’s response, it has learned nothing from the last year. The government should demand a direct, unconditional apology, not a quiet clarification buried in a press briefing.
The lesson here is not really about one airport or one official. It is about how long this government intends to let “routine screening” function as a euphemism every time Delhi wants to remind Bangladesh of the old order of things. The uprising settled that question domestically. It is past time it got settled at the border too.
There is a reason these expulsions happen at night. Light makes witnesses, and witnesses make accountability, which is precisely what India’s Border Security Force has spent the past month trying to avoid along its frontier with Bangladesh. According to Human Rights Watch, that effort has failed. Comprehensively.
Since 1 June, Bangladesh’s border guards have foiled 21 separate attempts by the BSF to force more than 200 people, among them children, through breaches in the barbed-wire fence and into Bangladeshi territory. This is not an aberration. Twenty-one incidents in a matter of weeks describes a system, not a mistake and systems require sign-off, infrastructure, personnel briefed and dispatched with intent.
The testimony assembled by HRW is difficult to read as anything other than what it is: state-enabled cruelty dressed in the bureaucratic language of migration control. In Panchagarh, ten people including children were stranded on an embankment in no man’s land for 75 hours, exposed to lightning and heavy rain, sustained by what witnesses called minimal food from the very force that had put them there. In Thakurgaon, a pregnant woman and her child were among those left stranded for nearly two days at the zero line before being taken back. These are not the conditions of a managed deportation process. They are the conditions of abandonment.
What makes the pattern harder to defend, not easier, is the documentation now sitting behind it. A union council member in Panchagarh recalls meeting a family from Siliguri carrying Aadhaar cards, India’s own proof of citizenship, whose eldest member had voted in four previous elections. Their names had simply vanished from a revised electoral roll, one of more than nine million removed in West Bengal ahead of March’s state elections and within months they were being walked toward a border that was never theirs to be walked toward. In Assam, a citizenship verification drive in 2019 left close to two million people stateless; Human Rights Watch reports that exclusion from voter rolls has since become, in one activist’s words, a trigger for arrest, detention and expulsion in itself.
West Bengal’s newly installed chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, has been candid about the intent behind this machinery, describing a “detect, delete and deport” policy that he says has already forced nearly 5,000 people back across the border. Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has been equally direct, telling Human Rights Watch that authorities “take them to a convenient location near the border” and “literally push them across”, an admission, in his own words, of exactly the practice his government’s diplomats might otherwise call unsubstantiated.
None of this withstands the standards India has signed up to. Arbitrary deprivation of citizenship, expulsion without due process, detention without access to legal representation these are violations of international human rights law, not policy choices a government gets to make unilaterally because the people affected happen to speak Bengali. The expulsion of children compounds the breach: the Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees protection from arbitrary detention and a right to nationality that does not evaporate because an electoral roll was redrawn.
Bangladesh’s response throughout has been the position any sovereign state is entitled to take: no entry outside legal channels, no acceptance of anyone without verification, and no willingness to absorb the human cost of another country’s domestic political project. That is not intransigence. It is the baseline of how borders are meant to work between neighbors operating in good faith a standard India’s own conduct, documented now in granular and repeated detail, has failed to meet.
The Indian government has the means to dispute findings it considers unfair. What it does not have, after this month, is deniability. Twenty-one foiled attempts, nine witness accounts, and statements from its own state leadership describing the practice in plain terms have closed that door. The only question remaining is whether Delhi corrects course, or simply waits for the next moonless night.
A manufactured humanitarian crisis is unfolding at Bangladesh’s border with India, and the world must pay attention. What began as BJP campaign rhetoric has metastasized into a systematic, state-sponsored program of forced expulsions, unilateral “push-ins” that violate diplomatic norms and inflict human suffering on hundreds of innocent people.
The numbers tell a stark story. Between May 2025 and January 2026, approximately 2,400 to 2,500 individuals were targeted in forced push-in maneuvers. In recent weeks, Border Guard Bangladesh intercepted 21 coordinated eviction attempts, preventing the forced entry of more than 200 men, women, and children. Since June 3 alone, 186 people were stopped across 18 separate incidents.
This is not accidental border tension. This is deliberate policy.
Following the BJP’s electoral victory in West Bengal, the new state government pivoted instantly from the previous administration’s resistance. Within a month, nearly 5,000 alleged irregular migrants were deported, triggering aggressive sweeps at Benapole and Hakimpur. In Assam, now the policy laboratory for exclusion—30,000 people have been declared “foreigners” through the National Register of Citizens, with hundreds systematically pushed toward the Bangladesh border since mid-2025. Tripura, under nearly a decade of BJP rule, has maintained persistent border raids throughout 2025 and 2026.
The mechanism is what India calls “double-engine governance”: seamless coordination between New Delhi and state capitals, armed with the sweeping Immigration and Foreigners Act of 2025, bypassing traditional verification protocols entirely. Border enforcement has become a domestic political weapon.
The humanitarian consequences are severe. When BSF fails to force people into Bangladesh, they are often taken back but most are not allowed to re-enter India. These individuals now live in inhumane conditions in open areas, stranded between two nations, denied basic rights, and abandoned by the state that expelled them.
Bangladesh’s response has been measured and diplomatic. The government raised the issue through formal channels, convened the 57th DG-level BGB-BSF conference in New Delhi, and prepared BGB to resist illegal push-ins across 26 vulnerable districts along the 4,156-kilometer border. Foreign Affairs Minister Shama Obaed correctly noted that formal repatriation procedures exist, India should follow them.
But diplomatic discussions alone cannot stop a strategy driven by domestic political gain. The BJP’s electoral expansion has transformed border enforcement into a political tool, creating a profound geopolitical crisis that threatens regional stability.
The international community must ask: when does border enforcement cross into human rights violations? When does political strategy become a humanitarian catastrophe? The answer is clear: when unilateral expulsions bypass diplomatic protocols, when people are treated as political problems to be “deleted,” and when hundreds of innocent men, women, and children are left stranded in open areas without protection.
Bangladesh stands on principles of sovereignty, respect, and diplomatic dignity. But the world must recognize this crisis. This is not merely a bilateral dispute. This is about how nations treat human beings at their borders. And currently, India’s eastern borderlands are failing that test.
The crisis has risen to the top of India-Bangladesh bilateral agenda. It threatens regional stability. And unless India respects diplomatic protocols and formal repatriation procedures, it will continue to strain relations with its neighbor.
Borders should protect nations. They should not be weaponized to force people out without reason, without process, and without humanity. The world must hold India accountable.
There is a particular kind of diplomatic cynicism that does not announce itself. It arrives quietly, at the border, in the dead of night, dressed not as hostility but as bureaucratic necessity. What India is doing along its frontier with Bangladesh right now fits that description precisely.
The Border Security Force has been attempting to push undocumented individuals into Bangladeshi territory across more than ten locations at once. From Jhenaidah in the south to Sylhet in the east to Panchagarh in the north, the pattern is too coordinated, too simultaneous, to be dismissed as isolated incidents of poor judgment by personnel on the ground. This is policy. The only question worth asking is whose.
West Bengal’s chief minister has provided part of the answer, publicly confirming that thousands excluded under the Citizenship Amendment Act have already been forced across, with hundreds more in holding facilities awaiting the same fate. India’s own officials, in other words, are not even pretending this is anything other than what it is, a deliberate transfer of unwanted populations across an international border without documentation, without consent, without legal basis.
Bangladesh has responded with restraint that, frankly, India does not deserve. Over a dozen formal protests have been filed. The Home Minister has asked, with considerable diplomatic patience, that India simply follow the procedures that already exist. The Border Guard has turned back every attempt. A bilateral meeting of senior border officials has already taken place. None of it has made any difference. The push-ins continue.
This matters beyond the immediate humanitarian concern, though that alone should be sufficient. It matters because it is happening at precisely the moment when both governments were publicly committed to a reset. The collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2024 left relations in a difficult place. The BNP’s election victory earlier this year created an opening. Ministerial visits followed. Water-sharing talks, long frozen were back under discussion. The language from both capitals was, for once, conciliatory.
Against that backdrop, the border incidents are not a coincidence. They are a message. Analysts who have described the push-ins as leverage ahead of high-stakes negotiations are not being uncharitable toward India. They are simply reading the situation as it is. The timing, the scale, and the continuation of push-ins even after diplomatic engagement has taken place all point in the same direction.
Some have suggested this reflects a division within the Indian state rather than a unified strategy that West Bengal’s newly elected BJP government and the BSF are operating with a degree of autonomy that New Delhi’s central government does not fully endorse. That interpretation, while possible, offers cold comfort. If India cannot control what its own border force does, that is a governance failure of the first order. If it can but chooses not to, that is something worse.
What is not in doubt is the effect. Every push-in attempt that Bangladesh repels is another data point in an emerging portrait of a neighbor that speaks the language of partnership while acting on entirely different instincts. Bangladesh has extended goodwill. It has opened channels. It has shown, repeatedly, that it is willing to work within established frameworks to manage a relationship that carries enormous consequence for both countries.
India’s response has been to keep crossing the line.
A new chapter, both governments said. But a new chapter requires both parties to turn the page. Right now, only one of them is trying.
There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of Bangladeshi politics. The party that governs today under the banner of Bangladeshi nationalism commands mass support, yet the philosophy that gave that nationalism its meaning remains poorly understood, even among those who claim it most loudly.
This is not merely an intellectual failure. It is a political vulnerability.
Bangladeshi nationalism was never conceived as a narrow formula. It was not the racial chauvinism of European ethno-states, nor the language-first politics that defined earlier Bengali identity movements, nor the religion-based framework that Pakistan used to justify its domination over the East. It emerged as something more ambitious: a synthesis. A nationalism rooted in geography, history, language, faith, economic aspiration, and the moral memory of a liberation war fought at tremendous cost.
What made this conception distinctive was precisely its refusal to reduce the nation to a single axis. Religion is not absent from Bangladeshi nationalism; it is woven into the character of its people, and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. But it is not compulsory, and it is not weaponized. The principle, drawn from the Quran itself, is that faith cannot be enforced. What the state owes every citizen is the freedom to practice their religion without fear, not the imposition of one community’s beliefs upon another. Bangladesh is not secular in the way France performs secularism, with aggressive erasure. Nor is it theocratic. It occupies a third position — one that acknowledges the spiritual dimension of public life without surrendering pluralism.
This is a serious intellectual position. It deserves serious political articulation.
The failure to articulate it has had consequences. For decades, Bangladeshi nationalism was treated as a brand rather than a philosophy; a flag to wave, a slogan to chant. The philosophical content was hollowed out by short-term electoral calculations and factional self-interest. Leaders who could have built a genuine ideological constituency instead built patronage networks. The result was a movement that won elections but struggled to build institutions.
The original vision was more demanding. It called for decentralization; not as administrative convenience, but as a structural commitment to people’s power at the village level. It called for increased production as the material precondition for social justice, rejecting the notion that redistribution alone can build an equitable society without first generating what is to be shared. It called for human resource development across gender lines, recognizing that a country cannot realize its potential while sidelining half its population. It named sovereignty, against imperialism, expansionism, and the softer violence of cultural dependency, as a continuing project, not a settled fact.
None of this is outdated. Bangladesh today faces precisely the pressures that the original nationalist framework was designed to confront: asymmetric regional relationships that threaten to subordinate national interests to those of more powerful neighbors; economic structures that generate wealth without equitable distribution; a democratic culture still susceptible to capture by self-interested elites.
The question for the current moment is whether Bangladeshi nationalism can recover its philosophical depth. Whether the party that carries this tradition can distinguish between wielding power and fulfilling a national project. Whether it can speak to young Bangladeshis; pragmatic, connected, increasingly educated, not just as voters to be mobilized but as citizens invested in a common vision.
A nationalism worth anything is one that tells people not only who they are, but what they are building. Bangladesh has that story. The harder task, always, is living up to it.
The numbers have a bluntness that diplomatic language cannot quite absorb. Between May 2025 and May 2026, roughly 2,463 people were pushed into Bangladesh by Indian authorities; mostly BSF personnel, across various border points. Of those tallied in an earlier eight-month window, at least 120 were subsequently identified as Indian nationals. This is not deportation. It is disposal.
On Christmas night 2025, a 73-year-old man from Odisha named Sheikh Abdur Jabbar was pushed through the Nimtala border gate in Chuadanga along with thirteen members of his family — five women, five men, four children, after being labelled Bangladeshi by the BSF. His Aadhaar card had been confiscated before the crossing. He spoke Hindi. He had never set foot in Bangladesh. In a similar case, a 68-year-old woman from Barpeta, Assam, whose entire family had been recognized as Indian citizens, was declared a foreigner by a tribunal and pushed across under cover of night. A year later, she struggles to walk without support and lives in constant fear of rearrest.
India calls this deportation policy. But deportation has rules; identity verification, formal handover, diplomatic notification. What is happening at the Bangladesh border has none of these. Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stated the operational logic with unusual candor: “Earlier, we used to arrest them, produce them in courts and follow the legal procedure. But now we are pushing them back right from the border in order to avoid the legal procedure and the hassles.” That is not a deportation policy. That is an expulsion policy and the distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a legal act and an illegal one.
The political machinery behind this is equally visible. Over 80 percent of India’s border with Bangladesh now falls under the direct rule of the BJP, which has constructed its electoral dominance in the region substantially on anti-migrant rhetoric. The party’s framework, formalized through the Citizenship Amendment Act, sorts migrants by religion: Hindus from Bangladesh are refugees deserving protection; Muslims are infiltrators deserving expulsion. The practical consequence of that framework being applied at the border is that Bangladeshi Muslims and anyone who can plausibly be labelled as one, become candidates for removal, documentation or no documentation. With the BJP’s sweeping victory in West Bengal, there are now active discussions in Indian political circles about bypassing holding centers altogether and handing detainees directly to the BSF for immediate border transfer, removing the last procedural speed bump between detention and expulsion.
Bangladesh’s border forces have held the line literally. In a single 24-hour period earlier this month, BGB foiled ten separate push-in attempts across different border points, including one incident where 30 to 35 people were reportedly brought to the border in a prison van by BSF personnel. BGB personnel, in several instances, stood their ground alongside local residents. That resistance is not aggression; it is the minimum assertion of sovereignty that any state owes its own border.
The killing figures sit alongside the push-in figures and demand to be read together. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, 34 Bangladeshis were killed by the BSF in 2025, 24 in shooting incidents and 10 following physical assault. The annual toll was 30 in 2024, 31 in 2023, 23 in 2022, 18 in 2021. Between 2000 and 2020, at least 1,236 Bangladeshis were killed and 1,145 injured in BSF shootings. The majority were cattle traders, farmers, and day laborers. These were not combatants. They were people navigating a border that colonial cartographers drew through the middle of communities, livelihoods, and family ties. The BSF shoots them. Then the same force pushes others across without papers. The border is being used as both a killing ground and a dumping ground and the two functions serve the same political purpose: to establish, through sheer force, that India decides who belongs and who does not.
The political shift on the Indian side makes the trajectory clear. Under Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, land acquisition for border fencing stalled for years due to political ambivalence toward the project. The new West Bengal government’s first Cabinet meeting approved the transfer of approximately 600 acres of land to the BSF for completing border fencing, with Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari announcing the handover would be completed within 45 days. The fence, once a contested federal imposition, is now state policy. Combined with the push-in surge and the killing record, this represents a comprehensive hardening of India’s border posture, one that Bangladesh is absorbing on the receiving end without having been consulted.
Bangladesh has taken a firm position against any form of illegal push-in and border killings, raising both issues at the BGB-BSF Director General-level talks that opened in New Delhi on June 8. That insistence is correct and necessary. The procedural demands Bangladesh is pressing verified identity before any transfer, formal diplomatic notification, no expulsion of third-country nationals onto Bangladeshi soil, are not radical claims. They are the minimum requirements of any functional bilateral border arrangement, and India has nominally committed to them in existing agreements. Holding India to its own commitments is not confrontation. It is the legitimate exercise of sovereign rights by a state that has been patient far longer than the facts warrant.
Bangladesh does not owe India a frictionless border in exchange for being treated as a dumping ground. It owes its own citizens and the people being pushed across without papers, a government that says so clearly, and does not stop saying it.
Every country tells a story about itself. The story Bangladesh tells or rather, the story it argues over, cuts to something fundamental: not just who governs, but who belongs.
Ziaur Rahman’s answer to that question was deceptively simple. He called it Bangladeshi nationalism, and four decades on, it remains one of the most consequential and least understood ideas in the country’s political life.
The misunderstanding usually starts in the same place. Critics frame it as a rejection of Bengali identity; a political maneuver designed to distance Bangladesh from its liberation inheritance. But that reading collapses under scrutiny. Ziaur Rahman never disputed that Bangladeshis are Bengali in language and in cultural temperament. What he disputed was the assumption that language alone could bear the full weight of national identity for a sovereign, plural state.
It is worth sitting with that distinction, because it is not a small one.
When Bangladesh emerged in 1971, it inherited not just a flag but a country, a country that included, alongside its Bengali-speaking majority, the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Mro, Bawm, and dozens of other communities across the Chittagong Hill Tracts, each with languages, histories, and ways of life that Bengali cultural nationalism had no natural vocabulary to accommodate. A national identity that could not speak to them without asking them to dissolve into the majority was not a national identity at all. It was a majority identity with national pretensions.
This is where Bangladeshi nationalism did its most serious philosophical work. Ziaur Rahman proposed a civic identity, rooted not in ethnicity or language but in shared citizenship, shared territory, and a shared stake in the country’s future. His now-famous bouquet metaphor was not decorative. It made a precise argument: that a nation, like a bouquet, draws its strength from the distinctiveness of its parts, not from forcing every flower into the same shape. A Chakma could remain fully Chakma. A Marma would lose nothing of cultural life. A Bengali would surrender no part of linguistic heritage. All would be, and feel, Bangladeshi.
That is harder to build than it sounds and Ziaur Rahman knew it. His pragmatism showed in the way the philosophy extended outward. Rather than tethering Bangladesh to a single regional patron, he opened diplomatic and economic relationships across the Muslim world, China, the United States, and the broader developing world. The early architecture of the remittance economy, the expansion of Bangladesh’s international footprint, the deliberate cultivation of strategic space, all of it was an expression of the same underlying instinct: that a country confident in a secure, composite identity can engage the world on its own terms.
Scholar B K Jahangir, in his rigorous study of Bangladeshi nationalism, argued that in a society of this complexity, single-identity nationalism does not unify, it privileges. Durable cohesion, he contended, requires a political framework expansive enough to hold different communities, regions, and traditions without demanding that any of them disappear. The philosophy Ziaur Rahman articulated was precisely such a framework.
The bouquet, in other words, was not a metaphor for sentimentality. It was a metaphor for statecraft.
That is why the idea keeps returning. In an era of intensifying identity pressure, geopolitical competition, and the constant temptation to define nations by what or whom, they exclude, the question Ziaur Rahman posed remains the right one: how does a diverse society hold together without becoming coercive? His answer was incomplete, as all political philosophies are. But it pointed toward something that many countries, far larger and more powerful than Bangladesh, are still searching for a nationalism that draws its strength not from uniformity, but from the dignity of difference held in common.