Beyond the fence: The erosion of due process at the India-Bangladesh border

As identification sweeps intensify from Delhi to Maharashtra, a growing number of Indian citizens are finding themselves caught in a chaotic system of forced deportation.

The nightmare for one Birbhum family began not at the frontier, but in a quiet Delhi neighbourhood where they had lived and worked for two decades. Despite carrying Aadhaar cards, voter IDs, and birth certificates, they were swept up in an identity-verification drive and, within forty-eight hours, pushed across the border into Bangladesh. It took a pointed intervention from the Calcutta High Court to label the deportation "hot haste" and bring them home. This was not a bureaucratic glitch; it was the intended output of a machine now running at full capacity.

The mechanics of the crisis

What is unfolding along the border is less a migration dispute and more a fundamental collapse of due process. While both New Delhi and Dhaka maintain that verified nationals should be repatriated through official channels, the reality on the ground has shifted since mid-2025. Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) records reveal a staggering escalation: over 2,300 people were pushed across between May 2025 and January 2026. Among them were not just migrants, but 126 Indian nationals and 38 citizens of Myanmar, caught in a dragnet that spans from the heart of India to the fence.

The terminology used by both sides highlights the chasm in perspective. While Indian authorities lean on the term "pushbacks"—a clinical import from global border enforcement discourse—the term fails to account for the reality of individuals being plucked from homes in Mumbai or Assam and driven thousands of kilometres to the border. The Bangladeshi term, "push-ins," is far more descriptive of a process that bypasses legal verification entirely. In one instance in Jhenaidah, BGB personnel had to physically block a prison van bearing Indian markings from reaching the fence.

The politics of the numbers

The political narrative driving these actions rests on thin ice. For years, the claim of ten to twenty million "illegal Bangladeshis" has been a staple of public discourse, yet it remains untethered from statistical reality. Even if the higher estimates were accurate, they would represent a marginal fraction of India’s population. The 2019 National Register of Citizens in Assam—the most rigorous attempt to quantify the issue—left out 1.9 million people, a figure significantly lower than political rhetoric suggested, and one that eventually became a administrative tangle that even state leaders have struggled to defend.

Why it matters

The broader implications here are chilling for the rule of law. When state agencies operate under a mandate that prioritises speed over evidence, the collateral damage is inevitably the citizen. The pattern suggests that the "real crisis" is not the movement of people, but the internal pressure to produce results in the name of border security. By replacing standard legal verification with "hot haste" deportations, the system risks devaluing the very documents—Aadhaar and voter IDs—that define Indian citizenship. Unless the mechanisms of verification are restored, the border will continue to be a place where the state’s reach far exceeds its legal grasp.