India keeps making fresh bids to push people into Bangladesh unlawfully after India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide election victory in the West Bengal state in early May.
- 2,463 pushed into Bangladesh in a year
- HM says no repatriation without verification
- Border tensions rise after West Bengal polls
- 34 Bangladeshis killed along border in 2025
The Border Guard Bangladesh recently foiled several Indian push-in attempts while the Indian Border Security Force has reportedly gathered many people along the border to force them into Bangladesh as its nationals without verification.
Besides push-ins, other hostile incidents -- including the rise in border killing by the BSF, installing poles within 150 yards in the no-man’s-land, tensions between Bangladeshis and the BSF -- have risen following the BJP election victory in West Bengal.
On Monday, BGB members foiled several attempts by the BSF to push more than 100 people into Bangladesh through the Benapole border in Jashore district.
The BSF assembled the people, including men, women, and children, on the Indian side of the border along Benapole Land Port in Jashore, reported New Age Jashore correspondent quoting BGB-49 Battalion commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Saiful Islam Khan as saying.
Of them, 10 people, including a 9-month infant, spent two nights under the open sky at a bushy place along the Indian frontier as they were pushed into the zero-line area after removing the iron fence erected by the Indian authority.
On May 27, tensions erupted between the BGB and the BSF over an attempted push-in of 14 individuals into Bangladesh at the Boraibari border in Rowmari upazila of Kurigram district.
According to New Age statistics, 2,463 people were pushed into Bangladesh by Indian authorities, mostly the BSF, from May 7, 2025 to May 8, 2026.
Of them, at least 223 were Rohingyas, including 50 registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in India.
But BGB headquarters data reveal that India pushed 2,344 people, including 126 Indian nationals, into Bangladesh between May 7, 2025 and January 26, 2026.
BGB officials, however, claimed that no push-in incident took place from India after January 26 this year.
On May 8, the BSF pushed 10 more people, including children and women, into Bangladesh through a Kulaura upazila border point in Moulvibazar district.
Home minister Salahuddin Ahmed on Tuesday said that Dhaka was against any kind of illegal push-in or push-back while the BGB was now on alert along the border.
He was responding to a question from a journalist at the secretariat over the BSF’s mobilisation of people along border to push them into Bangladesh claiming them to be Bangladeshis.
‘If any Bangladeshi citizen has gone to India for any reason and if Indian authorities have conducted NID verification and the central government has made a list and sent it to the Bangladesh foreign ministry, the foreign ministry would follow the repatriation process according to legal procedure,’ said Salahuddin.
He hastened to add that no such list was pending with the Bangladesh government.
‘We would have addressed it legally if such a list was pending with Bangladesh earlier,’ the home minister added.
Meanwhile, the 57th four-day director general-level talks between the BGB and the BSF are scheduled to be held in New Delhi from June 8 to June 11.
Killing of Bangladeshis by the BSF along the border, pushing people into Bangladesh unlawfully, and repatriating illegal migrants would be high on the agenda in the talks, according to BGB headquarters officials.
Despite repeated pledges by the neighbouring country to bring the number of border killings down to nil, the killing of Bangladeshis by the BSF and Indian citizens along the border in 2025 marked the highest point in the past five years.
According to human rights organisation Ain O Salish Kendra’s yearly human rights report, 34 Bangladeshis were killed by the BSF in 2025. Of them, 24 were killed in BSF firing and 10 others died after suffering physical torture by the BSF.
The ASK data show that the number of border killings was 30 in 2024, 31 in 2023, 23 in 2022, and 18 in 2021.
According to Bangladesh authorities, Bangladesh shares 4,156-kilometre-long border with India, of which some 180 kilometres fall on different water bodies and 79 kilometres on the Sundarbans.
On May 24, the West Bengal government handed over an initial 75 acres of land to the BSF to raise fences along 27 kilometres of the international border between India and Bangladesh, reported The Times of India on May 25.
West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, who had earlier promised to start the land handover process after the BJP government assumed office, said that the completion of the critical, long-pending fencing along the India-Bangladesh border would be crucial to national security, added the report available online.
Of the 75 acres of land, 43 acres were directly purchased while 32 acres were vested property.
