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.
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