Bangladesh foreign affairs advisor Md. Touhid Hossain said on June 3 that the interim government will soon send “a fresh and substantive diplomatic note” to India over its push-back of undocumented Bangladeshi nationals across the border. India has shared a list of individuals it claims to be Bangladeshi nationals, he said, adding that Bangladesh has received some of them after verification. The concern, however, is the way many are being “pushed back” without adhering to formalities. Dhaka wants New Delhi to use mechanisms to address such matters.
“Push back” refers to the forced deportation of undocumented migrants without following a judicial or diplomatic process. In Bangladesh, this is called “push in.”
From the beginning of May, India has been deporting batches of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants through its eastern and northeastern borders. They were rounded up in the western states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, in the national capital of Delhi, and the northeastern state of Assam. There is no official data yet, but nearly 2,000 people are estimated to have been deported over the past month.
This has triggered political tension in Bangladesh, with the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government’s critics urging the government to prioritize addressing the issue.
Dhaka-based media reported that India’s Border Security Force (BSF), which guards the border with Bangladesh, transported a batch of 78 people on a ship – all of them blindfolded – and dropped them at the remote Mandarbaria Char (island) in the Sundarbans on the morning of May 9.
In a diplomatic note sent the same day, Bangladesh told India that these push-ins violate the 1975 Joint India-Bangladesh Guidelines for Border Authorities, the Coordinated Border Management Plan (CBMP) of 2011, and the agreements reached during director general-level meetings between the BSF and the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB).
Nevertheless, the push-backs have continued.
The BGB’s Director General Major General Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Siddiqui informed the media in Dhaka that 280 people had been pushed into Bangladesh between May 6 and 12. These push-backs were happening at unpopulated stretches of the border where BGB personnel were not present at that time.
In a recent editorial, headlined “India’s Impunity At The Border Must End,” The Daily Star, one of Bangladesh’s leading English dailies, wrote that continued push-ins were “testing the limits of bilateral relations.”
Bangladesh-India relations have significantly soured following the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has been in India since flying out of Dhaka on August 5, 2024 after a student-led uprising ended her rule. Many other leaders of her now-banned Awami League party are believed to be in India as well. Bangladesh has sought her extradition but India has not responded yet.
A Gradual Escalation
Over the past few months, the police in several Indian states ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been conducting raids in search of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants. This drive expanded in February 2025 after Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced a nationwide crackdown on undocumented Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants.
“This issue is directly linked to national security and must be handled with utmost seriousness,” Shah had said.
This happened, incidentally, after the Donald Trump administration deported planeloads of Indians.
The drives intensified after the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in India’s Jammu and Kashmir that claimed 26 lives.
In Gujarat — the home state of Modi and Shah — the police detained more than 6,500 people in the last week of April to verify their identity. The detained persons were mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims. Speaking to the media, Gujarat Director General of Police (DGP) Vikas Sahay had said that those found to be Bangladeshis will be pushed back with the help of the BSF.
Between January and May 2025, about 700 people have been sent back to Bangladesh from Delhi alone, state broadcaster All India Radio reported on May 30.
Many Bengali-speaking Muslims from eastern India’s Bangladesh-bordering West Bengal have borne the brunt of the anti-infiltration drives in the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh, where the police and Hindu nationalist vigilante gangs tend to suspect any Bengali-speaking Muslim as a Bangladeshi infiltrator.
Bengali-speaking Muslims form roughly 90 percent of Bangladesh’s population and more than one-fourth of West Bengal’s.
Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam have also expressed fears that they might be pushed back as Bangladeshis. Several Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam have alleged that they were pushed into Bangladesh despite being Indians. They spent days on the “no man’s land” between the two countries and in Bangladesh before being sent back to India.
Push-back of undocumented migrants by India is not a new phenomenon. In 2003, Amnesty International condemned the practice. In fact, India had launched a drive formally named “Operation Pushback” in 1992.
However, illegal immigration from Bangladesh and pushing back undocumented immigrants has become one of the central points of India’s internal politics since the 2014 general election, when Modi — then the prime ministerial candidate — promised to weed out undocumented migrants and push them back if he got elected.
He also made a distinction: Hindu migrants, who are to be considered “refugees,” are to be sheltered in India and conferred with citizenship. Muslim migrants, whom the Hindu nationalists deem infiltrators, must be pushed back. To protect Hindu migrants, India enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, which came into force last year.
Rights and Courts
India’s action has triggered humanitarian concerns. Human rights organizations and activists have criticized the crackdown and pushback of immigrants.
“These acts are not only unlawful but also constitute a blatant violation of the Indian Constitution, the country’s criminal justice system, and international human rights treaties to which India is a signatory,” West Bengal-based rights organization, Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM), said in a statement issued on May 30.
In mid-May, another major controversy broke out when reports emerged that India had dropped 40 Rohingya people off a navy vessel in the Andaman Sea and made them swim into Myanmar territory with nothing but life jackets. They had been picked up from New Delhi a few days earlier. They reportedly held identity cards issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Aung Kyaw Moe, the deputy human rights minister of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, told Indian media portal Scroll that “deporting them while they were attempting refuge is sending them back to the hell they escaped from and survived.”
Senior advocates Colin Gonsalves and Prashant Bhushan had sought India’s Supreme Court’s intervention, arguing that the Rohingya people are at risk of genocide in Myanmar. They contended that as refugees, the Rohingya possess the right to remain in India.
However, in a May 9 order, the apex court refused to halt India’s action, ruling that the right to reside anywhere within India is limited to its citizens. If Rohingya migrants are “foreigners” under the Foreigners Act, they will be dealt with as per the law, the top court said. While the petitioners argued that persons identified as “refugees” by the UNHCR have constitutional protection against deportation to Myanmar, Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta submitted that India was not a signatory to the U.N. Convention on Refugees.
As migration researcher Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury had pointed out earlier, the absence of any standardized policy for the treatment of refugees allows India to deal with the situation according to the advantages it can draw. It also leaves scope for differential treatment and the use of refugees as strategic pawns, both in domestic and international scenarios.
The case of dropping off 40 Rohingyas in the sea was also brought to the top court’s notice, but it refused to entertain the plea, calling it a “beautifully crafted story.”
When the bench’s attention was drawn to the concerns expressed by Tom Andrews, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, the judges said that “people sitting outside don’t dictate our authority and our sovereignty.”
Later, the top court also refused to intervene in a matter pertaining to the deportation of allegedly illegal immigrants from Assam, asking the petitioners to approach the state high court instead.
The top court’s approach has likely come as relief to the Modi government, which is preparing to push more undocumented migrants back into Bangladesh.
State assembly elections are due in three eastern states of Bihar, Assam, and West Bengal within a year. Last year, elections in the eastern state of Jharkhand witnessed intense campaigning against “Bangladeshi infiltrators.” National security being one of the BJP’s top poll agendas, the drive against Bangladeshi immigrants can only be expected to continue, if not intensify, as a display of the Modi government’s resolute actions concerning national security.