BJP landslide revives push-in fears

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) landslide victory in West Bengal has turned old campaign rhetoric into a fresh border concern for Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh has tightened vigilance along parts of its border with India after the BJP’s landslide victory in West Bengal revived concerns over possible “push-ins” of people into Bangladeshi territory.

When India’s BJP swept to a historic landslide in West Bengal last week winning more than two-thirds of the state assembly seats, its first such majority there it did so on a campaign that had repeatedly threatened to brand the state’s Muslim residents as illegal immigrants and force them across the border into Bangladesh.

Now, with the BJP firmly in power along 2,216 kilometres of shared frontier, Bangladesh is watching, and preparing.

Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) has deployed additional troops and tightened surveillance across roughly 102 kilometres of border territory in the Benapole area of Jashore district, restricting movement along the zero line and ordering round-the-clock patrols.

The measures, which came into effect Thursday morning, cover border points from Raghunathpur and Shikarpur to Rudrapur and Daulatpur.

“BGB is maintaining strict vigilance to ensure that India’s Border Security Force cannot push anyone into Bangladesh illegally,” said Lt. Col. Kazi Mustafizur Rahman, the commanding officer of the 53 BGB Battalion.

Residents near the frontier, he added, have been asked to stay alert and to avoid unnecessary movement near the border, especially after dark.

A familiar fear, a new political reality The push-in threat — the forcible expulsion of people across a border without legal process — is not new to Bangladesh.

Over the years, incidents of the Indian Border Security Force pushing individuals into Bangladeshi territory have been a recurring source of friction between the two countries.

What is new is the political landscape in which that friction now exists.

The BJP’s dominance in West Bengal places one of India’s most politically assertive parties in direct administrative proximity to Bangladesh.

During the campaign, party leaders went beyond the usual nativist rhetoric, explicitly threatening to send Muslims to Bangladesh — comments that, however standard they may be as electoral theatre in India, land with particular weight on the other side of the border.

Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmad, speaking to reporters on Wednesday after emerging from a District Commissioners’ Conference in Dhaka, sought to project composure.

the government had put the BGB on alert, he confirmed, but he did not expect the threats to materialise into policy.

“I don’t see such a possibility,” he said. “But if it happens, so that they can address it.”

Salahuddin Ahmad, a former diplomat, argued that what politicians say on the campaign trail and what governments actually do in office are rarely the same thing.

He also noted that West Bengal’s new state leadership was unlikely to chart an independent course from the central government in New Delhi on matters of foreign consequence.

The weight of a shared border Geography has always made this relationship unusually intimate.

Bangladesh and India share the world’s fifth-longest land border, and the stretch along West Bengal alone exceeds 2,200 kilometres.

That proximity means that political tremors on one side are felt on the other — a fact that Dhaka has invoked repeatedly in its diplomatic dealings with New Delhi.

“Since the two countries share the world’s fifth-largest border, whatever happens in each other’s domestic affairs has an impact on the other country,” said Lailufar Yasmin, an international relations analyst.

She has urged caution about worst-case assumptions, pointing to the swift arrest of four BJP supporters who used a bulldozer to demolish a meat shop in the immediate aftermath of the election results — an act widely seen as sectarian intimidation.

“Swift actions like these,” she said, “can offer some reassurance.”

The BJP’s record in other states it governs has, over the years, generated formal protests from Dhaka.

Incidents of anti-Muslim violence in BJP-controlled states have periodically provoked diplomatic objections from Bangladesh, underscoring how domestic politics in India can become a bilateral irritant.

Bangladesh’s government, for its part, has been studiously measured in its public response — threading the needle between reassuring its own population and avoiding a diplomatic confrontation with a neighbour it is simultaneously trying to court.

State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shama Obaid told reporters Monday that Dhaka’s approach to unresolved issues with India would not shift based on West Bengal’s electoral outcome.

Water rights, pushbacks, trade — these were standing items on the bilateral agenda, she said, and they would be pursued through dialogue regardless of who sat in the state capital, Kolkata.

“Whether it’s the BJP or any other political party, from our side, the issues remain with us,” Obaid said. “Whoever the government is, we have to resolve them through dialogue.”

The next day, she was more pointed: India’s election, she said, was India’s internal matter.

Bangladesh would engage the world — including India — strictly on the terms of its “Bangladesh First” foreign policy.

“Regardless of which government comes to power, our foreign policy will not change,” she said.

The careful language reflects a bilateral relationship that is still in recovery.

Since Bangladesh’s mass uprising of 2024 and the subsequent interim government, ties with New Delhi had deteriorated sharply.

Protesters attacked Bangladesh’s Assistant High Commission in the Indian city of Agartala.

India suspended visa services for Bangladeshi nationals.

The relationship, long managed with quiet pragmatism, had been exposed to unusual turbulence.

Following Bangladesh’s national election on February 12, both governments said they were working to restore normalcy.

The BJP’s West Bengal landslide — and the shadow it casts — arrives at precisely the moment that effort was gaining ground.

Whether Dhaka’s studied calm holds will depend, in large part, on what the new West Bengal government does next.