India's BSF Is Expelling Its Own Bengali Muslim Citizens Across the Bangladesh Border

India's Border Security Force is carrying out one of the most cynical operations seen on the Bangladesh frontier in years. Under the cover of darkness, it is marching Bengali Muslim families, most of them Indian citizens, to the border and forcing them across the line into Bangladesh without charge, without a hearing, and without a shred of due process. When Border Guard Bangladesh refuses to accept them, these families are left stranded in the open at the zero line, trapped between two armed forces, exposed to the weather, and treated as if they were garbage to be dumped rather than human beings with rights.

On 16 June 2026, Human Rights Watch published detailed findings on these expulsions. The picture it paints is damning. This is not border management. This is the forced removal of a religious and linguistic minority, organised by the state and executed by the BSF.

Families Abandoned at the Zero Line

The documented incidents speak for themselves. On 5 June 2026, the BSF tried to push ten people, including children, into Panchagarh district. What followed was a standoff that lasted roughly 75 hours. The group was driven into a strip of no man's land, where they were exposed to severe lightning and heavy rain through the first night. According to a witness named Rubel Hossen, the group had advanced about fifty feet inside Bangladeshi territory before being trapped. The Indian guards supplied only some dry food, and only on the second day.

It did not stop there. On 6 June, six members of two Bengali Muslim households, including three men, two women, and a child, were left stranded overnight at Tetulbaria after Indian guards blocked them from returning to India. On 8 June, eleven people, among them a pregnant mother and a child, were stranded for roughly 48 hours in Thakurgaon district before eventually being allowed back into India.

Read those details again. A pregnant woman. Children. Families left in the rain at gunpoint, denied the right to return to the country where they live and to which many of them belong. This is what India's Border Security Force is doing in the name of national security.

The Scale of the Operation

This is not a handful of isolated mistakes. Bangladeshi border guards report that since 1 June 2026 they foiled 21 separate attempts by the BSF to push more than 200 people, including children, into Bangladesh's border districts. West Bengal authorities are reported to have forced back around 5,000 people, while more than 400 detainees have been held in border holding centres awaiting expulsion. These are the numbers of a deliberate campaign, not an accident.

Manufacturing Foreigners Out of Citizens

The cruelty at the border is the final step in a longer machinery of exclusion. Ahead of the March elections in West Bengal, India's election commission carried out a hurried and controversial revision of voter lists that dropped more than nine million names. In Assam, a flawed and discriminatory citizenship verification process had already left over 1.9 million people stateless in 2019. Exclusion from these rolls has become a trigger for arrest, detention, and expulsion, and a source of constant fear for ordinary Bengali Muslim families.

The political language leaves little room for doubt about intent. West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, who took office after the Bharatiya Janata Party won the March elections, has boasted of a policy he calls "detect, delete and deport" aimed at alleged "Bangladeshi infiltrators." Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has openly branded Bengali-speaking Muslims as "illegal immigrants." When the state decides in advance that a community does not belong, the paperwork to strip them of citizenship simply follows.

Here is the core injustice. The people being thrown across the border are overwhelmingly Indian citizens. They are not Bangladeshi nationals. Bangladesh has no obligation to absorb people that India is unloading at the fence to solve a problem of its own making. India is exporting its own citizens and pretending they were never Indian at all.

Reports of Extortion at the Fence

Alongside the documented expulsions, residents in the border belt describe a uglier layer to these operations. According to accounts circulating among border communities, BSF personnel have been demanding money from villagers, with the threat that those who cannot or will not pay risk being labelled as foreigners and pushed across the line into Bangladesh. In this telling, the threat of expulsion becomes a tool of extortion, turning a family's citizenship into something they must buy back.

These specific extortion allegations have not yet been independently verified, and we present them as reports from the affected communities rather than as established fact. But they cannot be dismissed. They fit the documented pattern exactly. When a force is already willing to march citizens into the rain and abandon them at the zero line, the line between security operation and shakedown becomes dangerously thin. These claims demand an independent and transparent investigation, not a reflexive denial.

A Catalogue of Broken Laws

Human Rights Watch identified violations of multiple binding instruments. The expulsions breach the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Forcing people across a border at night, with no legal representation and no chance to appeal, denies basic procedural safeguards. Leaving families stranded in the open without shelter or adequate food may amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

India is breaking border law, international human rights law, and the most basic standards of decency at the same time. A country that aspires to global leadership cannot credibly lecture anyone about rights while its own border force is pushing children into the dark and demanding that a minority prove it deserves to exist.

What Must Happen Now

Unity Rights Network calls on the Government of India and the Border Security Force to immediately:

• Halt all pushbacks and forced expulsions across the Bangladesh border without exception.
• Guarantee due process for every person accused of irregular status, including legal representation, a fair hearing, and the right to appeal.
• Open an independent investigation into the reports of extortion and threats by BSF personnel in the border belt.
• End the discriminatory targeting of Bengali Muslims through voter roll purges and citizenship verification drives.
• Restore citizenship and documentation to those wrongly stripped of it, and guarantee that children retain their nationality.
• Account publicly for every family stranded at the zero line and ensure their safe return and protection.

The international community, regional governments, and human rights bodies must not look away because the perpetrator is large and powerful. Every family pushed into no man's land is a citizen betrayed by the state that was supposed to protect them. India and its Border Security Force must be held accountable, and the world should be watching the fence.