India’s midnight border policy cannot survive daylight scrutiny

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.