Border Killings of Bangladeshis Are Not Statistics — and Dhaka Must Stop Talking Like They Are

Eight Bangladeshis have been killed at the Indian border in the first five months of this year, by gunfire or torture, according to rights group Ain o Salish Kendra. Thirty-four were killed last year. Behind each number: a body carried back across a paddy field, a family that will never see justice.

These deaths were on the agenda when the border guard chiefs of both countries — BGB and BSF — met in Delhi for their 57th director-general conference last month. The communiqués followed the traditional recipe: deep concern expressed, coordinated patrols promised, information sharing enhanced, next meeting scheduled for Dhaka in November. The killings, meanwhile, continue on the same border where they have continued for two decades, making it among the deadliest peacetime frontiers on earth.

What prompts this editorial is something worse than the killings’ persistence: the creeping normalisation of them in our own official language. Recent remarks from the home ministry — debated vigorously in the national press — have been criticised for edging toward the Indian framing, in which the dead are presumed smugglers first and citizens second. That framing must be refused, plainly and every time.

Say it clearly: no border offence in any civilised legal order carries a field execution as its penalty. A man crossing a border with cattle or cough syrup is entitled to arrest, a court, a lawyer — not a bullet. India, a democracy with a constitution it is proud of, applies no shoot-first doctrine on its borders with China or Pakistan, where actual soldiers stand. Only on the Bangladesh border do unarmed villagers die at this rate, and only here is the world asked to accept it as border management.

Dhaka’s negotiators face a hard structural reality — the neighbour is bigger, the relationship is dense, and this page has welcomed genuine thaws, including the visa resumption we covered last week. But warmth cannot be purchased with silence about corpses. The measure of the November talks in Dhaka should be one number the following year: zero. Anything else is failure wearing diplomatic language.

A state’s first duty is to insist, without apology, that its citizens’ lives are non-negotiable. Statistics forgive; newspapers should not.

Fact basis: ASK figures — 8 killed Jan–May 2026, 34 in 2025 (Daily Star); 57th BGB-BSF DG conference, Delhi, June 8–11, next in Dhaka Nov 2026; home minister remarks controversy (Daily Star opinion pages). Editorial judgments are the newspaper’s ow