View from Bangladesh: On border killings, Dhaka is helping defend New Delhi’s use of lethal force

When India explains the killings along the Bangladesh borders by the Border Security Force, it has long relied on a dependable script: the people who were shot were criminals, they were smugglers or the Indian forces had acted in self defence. In short, it relocated moral responsibility for the deaths from the force that fired to the Bangladeshis who had been killed.

In the two decades until 2020, the Border Security Force has killed 1,236 Bangladeshi citizens, according to the human rights organisation Odhikar.

This framing, policy analysts in Bangladesh say, allows New Delhi to avoid bilateral accountability and ensure that the body count along the world’s deadliest peacetime border remains, diplomatically speaking, somebody else’s problem.

However, what irks policy analysts in Bangladesh is the fact that Dhaka has been willing to accept India’s explanations.

On June 2, just six days before Bangladesh’s Border Guard sits across from the Border Security Force at Director General-level talks in New Delhi from June 8, Bangladesh Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed told reporters that deaths occurring when someone is “involved in crime or illegal intrusion” by a border force within its own territory should not be described as a border killing.

It was a pre-conference concession that India had not even negotiated for.

But Salahuddin is not the first...

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