Bangladesh says India tried to push migrants across border, reviving dispute

Bangladesh said it stopped several attempts by India to force people across the frontier over a 24-hour period, reviving one of the most sensitive fault lines in India-Bangladesh ties: who controls the border, who belongs on either side of it, and how migrants are processed when the two governments disagree.

Border Guard Bangladesh said it detected 10 attempted infringements along different stretches of the more than 4,000-kilometer border on June 4. In one reported case in Jhenaidah district in southwestern Bangladesh, the Bangladeshi side said personnel from India’s Border Security Force opened a gate and tried to move 30 to 35 people toward Bangladeshi territory in a prison van before the vehicle retreated. India’s Border Security Force and the Ministry of External Affairs did not immediately respond to the allegation.

The dispute has sharpened around India’s effort to push back Bengali-speaking Muslims it labels illegal infiltrators, a practice Dhaka says violates accepted procedures. Bangladesh has repeatedly said that anyone believed to be Bangladeshi should be handled through formal verification and repatriation channels, not pushed across the border. The frontier is difficult to police even in normal times, with varied terrain and a boundary that runs through villages, fields and remote crossings, making local incidents easy to ignite into diplomatic friction.

The political backdrop has also changed. Sheikh Hasina resigned on August 5, 2024, after a student-led uprising and later fled to India, ending the long rule of Bangladesh’s most India-aligned leader. Her exit altered the tone in Dhaka, where the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government of Muhammad Yunus has shown less patience for accusations that border enforcement is being used to sidestep legal process.

The issue is not new. In May, India said 2,862 nationality-verification cases involving suspected Bangladeshi nationals were pending with Dhaka, some for more than five years, and pressed Bangladesh to speed up verification so repatriations could move forward under bilateral procedures. Human Rights Watch said in July 2025 that Indian authorities had expelled hundreds of ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh without due process, reinforcing Dhaka’s argument that the question is about legal safeguards as much as migration control.

Bangladesh’s border guards intensified patrols and launched public-awareness campaigns along parts of the frontier in late May because of concern over alleged push-ins. The issue is expected to dominate director-general-level BGB-BSF talks in New Delhi from June 8 to 11, the first such meeting since the new government took office. If the two sides cannot lower the temperature, a local border clash could become a wider test of how much strain India and Bangladesh’s relationship can absorb.