On June 2, with a border conference six days away, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed spoke to reporters at the Secretariat and dismantled decades of Bangladeshi advocacy in a single sweep. His statement was deceptively simple: “If any foreign force kills someone by entering our border or at the zero line, then it can be called border killing. But if someone is involved in any sort of crime within our borders and their borders or if someone commits illegal trespassing, then they [border forces] will address the issue as per their own local laws. In such cases, it should not be called border killing.”
It is a definition that India’s officials and apologists have deployed, in various forms, for years. It is the argument that every Indian government spokesperson reaches for when the subject of Indian Border Security Force’s killings arises. It is, in substance, the same line a first secretary of the Indian embassy in Bangladesh offered back in 2011, insisting the BSF “does not attack civilians” and that any deaths were linked to border crime. What India could not get the international community to accept as a legitimate framework, Bangladesh’s own home minister has now volunteered as official doctrine—that too just less than a week before Bangladesh sits across the table from the BSF in New Delhi.
Should this be viewed as capitulation arrived at through legal confusion?
The term “border killing,” as it has been understood by human rights organisations, legal scholars, and bilateral diplomatic practice, refers to the killing of civilians in the context of border enforcement, regardless of which side of the zero line the body falls on. The entire moral and legal weight of the term rests not on geography, but on conduct—specifically, the use of lethal force against unarmed or lightly armed individuals who pose no existential threat. International law permits the use of force only in self-defence, and even then, within strict limits—any use of force must be proportionate to the threat posed. Under Article 6 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to life is non-derogable, while Article 2 of the Convention against Torture (CAT) outlines that no circumstances can be invoked to justify torture. Incidents of torture, killings, and other inhuman treatment inflicted by the BSF clearly breach these protections, as well as the guarantees of liberty and security under Article 9 of the ICCPR.
These apply even when the victim is suspected of a crime. Under India’s own Immigration and Foreigners Act, the maximum sentence for illegal entry into the country is seven years in prison and fines of up to 1,000,000 Indian rupees. Under Section 46 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC)—retained in the updated Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS)—police or security forces can use “all means necessary” to effect an arrest if a suspect forcibly resists. However, Section 46(3) explicitly limits this power by strictly prohibiting causing the death of a person who is not accused of an offence punishable by death or life imprisonment. Meanwhile, signed in 2011, the Coordinated Border Management Plan (CBMP) explicitly focuses on synergy between BGB and BSF. The core directive of this plan is to curb trans-border crimes (like smuggling and illegal immigration) using non-lethal weapons and joint, synchronised patrols. Following the signing, India’s then home minister P Chidambaram had said, “Let me make it very clear, we have issued strict instructions to our border security forces that under no circumstances should they fire upon anyone trying to cross either from Bangladesh to India or [from] India to Bangladesh. The message has gone down to the last jawan.” Unfortunately, it is a treaty obligation which India has repeatedly violated and Bangladesh has repeatedly pointed out at exactly the kind of DG-level border conference that begins on June 8.
The numbers are not abstract. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, 34 Bangladeshis were killed by the BSF in 2025—24 in firing incidents and 10 following physical torture. The figure was 30 in 2024, 31 in 2023, 23 in 2022, and 18 in 2021. More recently, at least four Bangladeshis were killed by BSF firing in the first four months of 2026. Meanwhile, Manabadhikar Shongskriti Foundation reported that in May alone, four Bangladeshis were killed by the BSF. Documentation by Odhikar reveals that at least 1,236 Bangladeshis were killed and 1,145 injured in shootings by the Indian border force between 2000 and 2020.
These were not combatants. The majority were cattle traders, farmers, and day labourers caught in the brutal economics of a borderland where livelihoods often require crossing a line that colonial mapmakers drew without any concern for the communities it would bisect.
The question the world has been asking for decades is not where the killing happened. It is whether a border force is entitled to execute rather than arrest. Going by the home minister’s logic, the answer would appear to be yes, provided the victim was on the other side of our border.
The upcoming June 8-11 conference in New Delhi will be the first DG-level talk since the BNP government came to power earlier this year. Issues related to border fencing, attacks on BSF personnel, checking infiltration, cross-border crimes, and the handing over of “illegal” Bangladeshi migrants are likely to be part of the Indian agenda. In return, the BGB is expected to flag issues related to the alleged killing of its nationals by the BSF, according to a report by Press Trust of India. The word “alleged” already signals the asymmetry Bangladesh faces at the table. Now it appears that its own home minister has walked in ahead of the delegation and conceded the underlying premise.
India will not need to argue; it may simply quote Dhaka.
There is a structural problem here that goes beyond one minister’s verbal stumble. The BNP government came to power with a genuine mandate to reset the border relationship with India, to extract accountability where the Awami League had traded it away for geopolitical warmth. The 2024 mass uprising produced, among other things, an expectation that the men and women killed along the border would finally be named, counted, and mourned as victims of an unjustifiable policy rather than explained away as smugglers who had it coming. That expectation is the basis on which a government can build a serious diplomatic case and raise the issue at multilateral human rights forums if accountability cannot be secured bilaterally.
All of that requires, as a minimum, that the government’s own officials not advance India’s argument for it before the talks begin. It requires, further, that Bangladesh’s position be coherent: that the death of a Bangladeshi national at the hands of an Indian paramilitary force, regardless of what that person was doing and regardless of which side of a wire fence he or she was standing on, is a matter of bilateral concern demanding accountability.
There have been others who confused territorial jurisdiction with moral and legal responsibility. But the home minister has done this at the worst possible moment, just before a conference where Dhaka’s leverage is already limited by its geopolitical dependence and its unresolved diplomatic relationship with New Delhi. Incidentally, the home minister described the conference as a “routine annual exercise.” Perhaps that is the deeper problem. Given the persistent pattern of border killings, perhaps what is needed is less routine and more resolve to ensure that no unlawful death at the border is excused or overlooked under any pretext.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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