There is a particular kind of hypocrisy that comes dressed in the language of law. India has spent decades presenting itself to the world as South Asia’s responsible anchor a democratic heavyweight committed to regional cooperation, sovereign respect, and rules-based order. The ongoing crisis on its border with Bangladesh has stripped that narrative bare. What is unfolding today along the world’s fifth-longest land border is not immigration management. It is political dumping, conducted with impunity and defended with nationalist theatre.
The facts, as they stand, are damning. Bangladesh has identified 2,479 incidents of India “pushing-in” people between May 2025 and January 2026. Of those pushed across, the Border Guard Bangladesh has confirmed that at least 120 individuals are Indian nationals not Bangladeshi citizens at all. Let that sink in. India is expelling its own citizens into a foreign country and calling it border management.
The trigger was cynically timed. The current wave of push-ins began in the wake of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, on April 22, 2025, which killed 26 Indian citizens. A security crisis in Kashmir became the political justification for mass expulsions of Bengali-speaking Muslims thousands of kilometres away. The link between a Kashmiri attack and a Bengali migrant worker in Maharashtra is non-existent except in the logic of Hindutva politics, where all Muslims are suspect and all Bengali Muslims are, by default, Bangladeshi.
Since May 2025, the BJP-led government intensified operations to expel ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh, ostensibly to deter people from entering India without legal authorisation. Several BJP-run state governments started rounding up Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers after the Ministry of Home Affairs set a 30-day deadline to “detect, identify, and deport illegal immigrants” and told local authorities to “establish adequate holding centers in each district.” The machinery of the state was not deployed to verify citizenship. It was deployed to remove Muslims.
Human Rights Watch, after conducting field investigations, delivered a verdict that should embarrass New Delhi on every international stage. “India’s ruling BJP is fueling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities’ claims that they are managing irregular immigration are unconvincing given their disregard for due process rights, domestic guarantees, and international human rights standards.”
The human cost behind these statements is not abstract. The Delhi police detained six members of two families in its search for illegal Bangladeshis. The BSF pushed these two families from West Bengal’s Birbhum district across the border into Bangladesh. One of the women, Sunali Khatun, was eight months pregnant at the time. The group comprised her husband Danish, their eight-year-old son, Sweety Bibi, and her two young sons. Their parents approached the Calcutta High Court, which ordered the Indian government to bring the group back. A court in Bangladesh later recognised them as Indian citizens and directed the Indian High Commission to repatriate them. Pregnant women, toddlers, stranded at the zero line this is what India’s immigration enforcement looks like in practice.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma admitted that at least 330 people were expelled without even going through the Foreigners’ Tribunals. “If someone is identified as a foreigner, we won’t send them to a tribunal; we will just keep pushing them back,” he said. The chief minister of an Indian state publicly admitting that his government bypasses judicial process before expelling people is not a scandal it is a policy statement. And it went largely unreported by India’s compromised mainstream media.
Bangladesh, for its part, has not been passive. It has been principled and that principled resistance is precisely what has embarrassed New Delhi most. Bangladesh sent a diplomatic note to India on May 9, 2025, protesting the push-ins, stating: “Such push-ins fuel negative public sentiment and are unacceptable. Bangladesh will only accept individuals who are proven to be its citizens and returned through proper procedures.” Dhaka has sent four successive diplomatic letters, summoned India’s acting high commissioner, raised the issue with the UNHCR, and instructed the Border Guard Bangladesh to physically resist further push-ins at the frontier.
Bangladeshi forces, backed by local villagers, reportedly stopped the Indian Border Security Force from pushing 57 people into Bangladesh at multiple crossing points in Lalmonirhat district. Thirteen people including women and infants were left stranded at the Zero Line, unable to enter Bangladesh and refused re-entry into India. The BGB requested a flag meeting with the BSF to resolve the situation, but received no response. New Delhi’s silence in the face of its own nationals stranded in no-man’s-land speaks volumes about the actual intent behind these operations.
India’s latest dispute with Bangladesh has exposed growing contradictions between New Delhi’s regional rhetoric and its actual conduct toward neighbouring states. For years, India has presented itself as South Asia’s stabilising force a responsible regional power committed to cooperation, connectivity, and mutual respect. Yet the current tensions with Dhaka reveal how India’s neighbourhood policy increasingly relies on political pressure, unilateral expectations, and diplomatic heavy-handedness rather than genuine partnership.
This is a pattern, not an aberration. India has for decades wielded its geographic stranglehold over Bangladesh encircling it on three sides as implicit leverage in bilateral dealings. Water-sharing disputes over 54 shared rivers remain unresolved for years. Trade imbalances heavily favour India. And now, when domestic politics demands a Muslim scapegoat, Bangladesh is expected to silently absorb thousands of people India has decided it no longer wants within its borders. A law professor observed that there is “executive pressure to remove” illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and “to strike fear within the community,” adding: “This is more of a Pahalgam reaction. We respond to a terror attack through immigration control even though there is no correlation between the two.”
The Modi government’s internal contradictions are now a regional security problem. A state that cannot distinguish between its own Bengali-Muslim citizens and undocumented migrants or worse, does not want to is a state whose border behaviour cannot be trusted. Bangladesh’s fears have deepened further with the BJP’s new electoral victory in West Bengal, with Dhaka’s concerns that the new dispensation would likely lead to an increase of push-in actions, targeting certain communities in particular.
Bangladesh’s refusal to absorb India’s failures without question is not a provocation. It is sovereignty in action. It is a smaller nation reminding a larger one that bilateral relations are not a one-way arrangement. The message from Dhaka is clear: India may be bigger, but it does not get to define who is Bangladeshi. It does not get to push pregnant women into the Sundarbans and call it law enforcement.
South Asia watches carefully. When a country that styles itself as the region’s democratic leader expels its own citizens across international borders, detains infants, bypasses courts, and ignores repeated diplomatic protests the mask has not slipped. It has been removed deliberately. The world should take note.
