IN 2025, border killings along the Bangladesh–India frontier reached a five-year high, with at least 34 Bangladeshi nationals killed by India’s Border Security Force, according to the Bangladeshi human rights organisation Ain o Salish Kendra. For years, such incidents were described as unfortunate excesses at a difficult border, episodic and manageable within the framework of bilateral diplomacy. That framing is becoming harder to sustain. The pattern increasingly suggests not isolated lapses but a deeper shift in how India enforces its border, one that places coercion at the centre of governance and treats due process as secondary. This is not only about the use of lethal force. It reflects a wider transformation in which pushbacks, informal expulsions and administrative shortcuts are becoming normalised practices along one of the most densely populated borders in the world.
In June 2025, two families from West Bengal’s Birbhum district were pushed across the border into Bangladesh by the BSF, including Sunali Khatun, who was eight months pregnant, her husband Danish, their eight-year-old son and Sweety Bibi with her two young sons. All were Indian citizens. No hearing was conducted, no documents were verified and no deportation order was issued. When the matter eventually reached the Calcutta High Court, and Bangladeshi authorities confirmed that those expelled were indeed Indian nationals, the process of repatriation began months after the fact. For Bangladesh, such cases are not simply internal administrative failures within India. They have immediate cross-border consequences, placing the burden of humanitarian response and verification on Dhaka. The case is significant precisely because it is not exceptional. It reflects a system that is increasingly willing to act first and justify later.
Convergence without capacity
ACROSS very different political systems, border enforcement is converging around a familiar set of practices that privilege deterrence over legality. The United States, Australia and the European Union have each developed institutional models that rely on detention without clear timelines, deportation with limited judicial scrutiny and pushbacks that often occur outside formal legal frameworks. In the United States, annual removals have at their peak exceeded 400,000, supported by a detention system with a daily capacity of roughly 34,000 and a yearly throughput exceeding 100,000 individuals. Across the European Union, over 300,000 irregular border crossings were recorded in 2022, backed by a dense infrastructure of coordinated returns and detention. Australia, though operating at a smaller scale, carries out roughly 10,000 to 20,000 removals annually while maintaining mandatory detention and offshore processing.
India has not replicated these systems at the same scale, nor does it possess comparable administrative capacity. However, from a Bangladeshi perspective, the resemblance lies in the underlying logic rather than the volume of enforcement. The emerging principle is consistent. Enforcement precedes legality and oversight, if it occurs at all, tends to be reactive rather than preventive. This shift has direct implications for Bangladesh, which increasingly finds itself on the receiving end of decisions taken without verification or coordination.
Agreements and unresolved boundaries
THIS hardening is taking place despite a long history of bilateral efforts to stabilise the border. The Land Boundary Agreement signed in 1974 between Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Indira Gandhi was intended to resolve the anomalies of partition, including enclaves and adverse possessions. Although Bangladesh ratified the agreement promptly, its full implementation took more than four decades, culminating in the 2015 exchange of enclaves that regularised the status of tens of thousands of residents and removed one of the most visible sources of legal ambiguity along the border.
Yet this settlement did not fully resolve all disputes. Several stretches of the boundary remain undemarcated, particularly in riverine sectors where shifting courses alter the physical landscape, and in pockets across Assam, Tripura and West Bengal where local interpretations of the boundary differ. Disagreements over fencing, including India’s construction of barriers within a certain distance of the zero line, have also generated recurring tensions. These unresolved issues create precisely the conditions in which discretionary enforcement thrives, allowing force to substitute for clarity on the ground.
Citizenship, expulsion and externalisation
NOWHERE are the consequences more visible than in Assam, where citizenship verification, detention and deportation have over time fused into a system organised around suspicion. The network of Foreigners’ Tribunals operates under relaxed evidentiary standards and often reverses the burden of proof, requiring individuals to demonstrate their citizenship rather than requiring the state to establish otherwise. The 2019 National Register of Citizens excluded over 1.9 million people, many of whom have lived in India for decades.
For Bangladesh, the critical concern is what follows from this process. Those declared foreigners are frequently assumed to be Bangladeshi, even in the absence of verifiable documentation linking them to Bangladesh. Dhaka has consistently refused to accept individuals without confirmed nationality, resulting in situations where people are pushed across the border only to be left stranded when Bangladesh denies entry. Pushbacks have increasingly become a routine instrument of enforcement along the border, often carried out without hearings, documentation or judicial oversight. Public statements by figures such as Himanta Biswa Sarma endorsing such practices indicate that this is not a matter of enforcement slipping outside legal bounds but of enforcement being structured to bypass them.
From Bangladesh’s perspective, this amounts to the externalisation of India’s internal governance challenges. Bengali-speaking Muslims, Rohingya refugees and in some cases documented Indian citizens are swept up in these operations and expelled across the border. Once they arrive, their legal status becomes Bangladesh’s responsibility. The cumulative effect is to transform the border into a zone where legal protections are uncertain and accountability is diffuse.
Lethal force and an illiberal drift
THE human consequences of this shift are particularly stark given the nature of the border itself. The Bangladesh–India boundary runs through densely populated areas where communities, livelihoods and families have historically extended across both sides. When enforcement becomes more coercive, the effects are immediate and deeply felt. Family separation, often associated with other global contexts, has occurred here with far less scrutiny. Individuals detained on one side may be expelled while their family members remain on the other, with little possibility of reunification.
In comparative terms, India does not rank among the most aggressive deporting states. Formal deportations typically number between 1,000 and 5,000 annually. At the other extreme, recent regional developments illustrate how quickly coercive logics can scale. Pakistan expelled approximately 1.7 million undocumented Afghans between 2023 and 2024, while Iran deported around 1.9 million Afghans in 2024 and 2025 alone. These are mass expulsions on a scale far beyond anything India has attempted. Yet the comparison is instructive. The issue is not that India has reached such extremes, but that the underlying methods are increasingly visible within its own system.
Along the Bangladesh border, the persistence of lethal force further distinguishes the Indian case. Human rights groups have documented dozens of killings annually, including the 34 deaths recorded in 2025. While the United States–Mexico border has seen hundreds of migrant deaths in a year, most occur due to exposure, drowning or accidents rather than direct gunfire by border personnel. Similarly, fatalities along Mediterranean routes number in the thousands, but these are largely the result of dangerous crossings rather than routine use of force by state agencies at land borders. The regularity with which shootings occur along the Bangladesh border, often in situations such as cattle trading or informal movement, points to an entrenched enforcement culture in which lethal force remains a normalised instrument.
This trajectory assumes particular significance in light of the current political moment in Dhaka. With Tarique Rahman now in office and signalling an intention to reset relations with India, there is an opportunity to revisit the foundations of border management. Previous agreements, including the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement and its eventual implementation in 2015, demonstrate that sustained engagement can yield results even on complex issues. At the same time, persistent disagreements over undemarcated segments, fencing practices and the handling of cross-border movement continue to generate friction. A meaningful reset will require more than reaffirming past commitments. It will require both sides to address the underlying enforcement paradigm and to ensure that border management is grounded in verification, due process and mutual accountability.
India’s border regime continues to be justified through reference to exceptional circumstances, including the legacy of 1971 and concerns about irregular migration. From Bangladesh, however, what is visible is the gradual normalisation of these exceptions into everyday practice. The danger lies in the steady erosion of safeguards, where practices that once appeared exceptional become routine. For Bangladesh, the costs of this shift are already evident. The challenge now is whether both countries can halt this drift and build on their past agreements to create a border regime that is not only effective but also just.
Sahasranshu Dash is a research associate at the International Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs, an independent research organisation in Sheffield, the United Kingdom.
