A prison van stops near a border gate. A group of frightened people is told to cross an international frontier. On the other side, armed guards refuse entry and order the vehicle back. Whether every detail of Bangladesh’s latest allegations against India is ultimately verified or disputed, the image itself captures the growing crisis along one of the world’s longest and most densely populated borders: a struggle over citizenship, identity, and sovereignty in which the most vulnerable often have the least voice.
The Bangladesh Border Guards recently said that there have been at least ten instances within 24 hours when the Indian authorities attempted to forcibly push individuals into Bangladesh through human trafficking. In one of the cases from the district of Jhenaidah, around 30 to 35 people were brought close to the border in a prison van before the action was taken by the Bangladeshi authorities. The Bangladesh government’s stance is that all Bangladeshis should be brought back via legal procedures.
The conflict arises at an extremely sensitive juncture in the relationship between Bangladesh and India. Given the recent shift in Bangladesh following the 2024 ouster of Sheikh Hasina, both nations have made efforts to ensure stability in their relationship despite differences in trade and water sharing issues. This new issue is likely to add to the existing rift.
Initially, the problem seems to be quite simple. India believes that there still exists a problem of undocumented immigration, which especially manifests itself in border areas like Assam, Tripura, and West Bengal. In turn, Bangladesh holds its position saying that it is impossible to accept those people who have not had their citizenship verified. This is not an isolated issue, citizenship crisis is causing widespread anxiety among the vulnerable communities
Perhaps the most pertinent example is that of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). This massive exercise in checking citizenship is one of the biggest ever performed by any country. The NRC involved reviewing citizenship for some 33 million individuals. Resultantly, around 1.9 million were denied inclusion when the final NRC was issued in 2019.
While the NRC’s supporters viewed it as an imperative task for the identification of undocumented immigrants, its opponents considered the NRC to be a bureaucratic exercise that unfairly targeted impoverished and disenfranchised groups, including the Bengali-speaking Muslims, who lack access to decades-long documents. While there may be no consensus in terms of political beliefs on the matter, the figures speak for themselves, showing how many millions were left without clear citizenship.
The problem becomes even more striking when examining enforcement outcomes. Over the years, more than 120,000 individuals have reportedly been declared foreigners through Assam’s tribunal system. Yet actual deportations have remained remarkably limited. Official figures cited by Indian authorities have shown that only a small fraction of those declared foreigners have ultimately been repatriated. This gap between identification and removal has created a legal and administrative vacuum.
In this very vacuum has time and again surfaced the claims of “push backs” and “push ins” operations. Human rights activists have raised fears that such informal arrangements may end up undermining the protection of procedural guarantees when there is uncertainty about citizenship status or where appeals are still under process. It is more than just procedural questions.
For Bangladesh, it also raises issues of sovereignty. It would be unjustifiable for any state to have people from other countries enter their territory without being sure of their nationality through appropriate procedures. The stance of Dhaka cannot just be attributed to diplomatic preferences; rather, it is based on international laws and regulations. The acceptance of unilateral transfers will not only affect India and Bangladesh but will also bring about undesirable effects on how neighborly countries govern borders elsewhere.
The humanitarian aspect is equally important. The boundary between India and Bangladesh is over 4,000 kilometers long and runs through villages, farms, rivers, and communities where their cultural link goes back even before the existence of borders. In such cases, there can be no easy documentation procedure. People might have resided in frontier zones for generations without proper identification papers because of a lack of information mechanisms.
The irony is that policies intended to ensure certainty have often produced the opposite. The NRC sought to settle the migration question in Assam, yet years later thousands remain trapped in legal limbo. Foreigners Tribunals were designed to establish clarity, yet nationality disputes continue. Allegations of push-ins and push-backs reflect not the success of the system but its unresolved contradictions.
Within this context, the forthcoming discussions between the Indian Border Security Force and Bangladesh’s Border Guards will have a significance that transcends the mere discussion of technicalities. Will it prove possible for two bordering nations to resolve their difficult migration problem through collaboration and not conflict? This is a question of importance not only diplomatically but for all those whose lives are affected by decisions made miles away from the border villages they live in.
Sustainable management of borders cannot be achieved by relying solely on enforcement through mechanisms which undermine proper process, and citizenship based on purely political considerations. When verification gets eroded and the main goal turns into expulsion, the danger lies in enforcement turning arbitrary in nature with actual humanitarian implications ensuing therefrom. In the case of the India-Bangladeshi borderlands, when issues of identity are not clear and documents are not consistently provided, it will only result in greater distrust, diplomatic strain, and insecurity for the already vulnerable populations.