The Bloodiest Border

My interest in documenting the Bangladesh-India border stems from my own upbringing in a refugee family. Bangladesh always held a mythical, unresolved place in my imagination – my parents’ homeland, left behind during Partition. Years ago, while working in a bank, I came across a news report about a Bangladeshi man killed by the BSF. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why such killings happened. But as similar stories kept appearing in the press, my curiosity deepened.

Later, when I began practising photography, I visited the border area out of interest. It was there, near Satkhira, that I witnessed a man being shot. Though I wasn't there to cover that incident specifically, it left a profound impact on me. The BSF wouldn’t allow me to photograph what had happened, but the experience haunted me.

When I travelled to Bangladesh for the first time, I met Mithun Saha, a Hindu customs officer at the Darshana border. I was struck by his presence. Why had he remained in Bangladesh, when the majority of Hindus had left? It challenged my assumptions about Partition.

Later, during my study on photography at Counter Foto, I realised this story needed to be told. The violence and trauma faced by ordinary civilians at the border – people often suspected as smugglers but simply trying to survive – was largely undocumented in visual media. “The Bloodiest Border” took shape as a response to that silence. It is not just a story of violence; it is a stand against the normalisation of brutality and a testimony to lives lost in a liminal, forgotten space.

As someone from Kolkata, my connection to Bangladesh is deeply personal. My family members are refugees from Barisal and Faridpur, with the last member crossing over during the 1971 war. Growing up in a refugee colony in Marwari Bagan, I was immersed in the language, customs, and culture of Bangladesh. The dialect spoken in my home is still the same as that of our ancestral land. My childhood was shaped by stories of loss, pain, and the sense of betrayal felt by those who had to leave everything behind.

This lived experience made the Partition of Bengal more than just a historical event: it was something I saw and felt every day. I witnessed the emotional and cultural scars it left behind, and this fuelled my desire to explore stories connected to that trauma.

My connection to Bangladesh has not changed, even when I witnessed its political turmoil in 2024. Every country undergoes difficult phases; this is not unique to Bangladesh.

The story of border killings resonated with me deeply. Tragically, Bengali Indians are often the victims, simply because the BSF can’t easily distinguish between the two sides – we look the same, speak the same, and share the same roots. That shared history, along with my family’s journey and my visits to Bangladesh, shaped my decision to tell this story. It is an attempt to humanise those caught between borders – people who are far too often seen only as statistics.

The Bangladesh-India border cuts through a landscape that is both serene and haunted. Rivers, fields and villages stretch across both sides without distinction – the land does not recognise borders. On the surface, it is peaceful and beautiful, but beneath that stillness lies a history soaked in blood.

This landscape carries the weight of pain, violence, and unspoken trauma. When you close your eyes, you can hear the echoes of cries, the fear of those chased or killed, and the silence of lives erased without reason. The land becomes a witness, holding memories of bodies fallen and tortured.

To me, the border is a monument to a tragic part of life – a wound created by Partition, where Bengali people, once united by language and culture, were divided in the name of religion. In doing so, they fractured their own identity.

The land resists this imposed violence by remaining indistinguishable on either side. It speaks of unity in geography and spirit, even as human actions try to divide it. The border landscape, in its quiet defiance, tells a deeper truth: that this division was never natural.

The borderland between India and Bangladesh is not a site of cross-border terrorism, but rather one of economic desperation, where smuggling has become a survival strategy for many agrarian families on both sides. These are people failed by both states, pushed into informal economies rather than provided with dignified livelihoods. Yet, not everyone who faces violence is involved in smuggling.

What stays with me most are the stories of innocent lives caught in this brutal system. Suman Islam, a young boy returning from a relative’s house during curfew hours, was tortured so severely by the BSF that he is now paralysed. His only mistake was being outside at the wrong time. Or Felani, a teenage girl whose scream, born out of fear, led to her being shot dead as she tried to cross the fence with her father.

One haunting memory is from Murshidabad, where I witnessed a group of young Muslim boys being violently interrogated by BSF personnel. The reason appeared to be their religion. I was compelled to delete the photos I took of that moment.

These stories are not exceptions. They reflect a pattern, one where borders criminalise identity and poverty, and where violence is routine and unaccounted for.

I have always found graphic images of violence deeply unsettling. There is only one instance, the image of a young Hindu boy killed at the border, that I felt compelled to photograph. But overall, I choose not to depict violence directly. Instead, I aim to convey its haunting presence through silence, absence and atmosphere.

This visual language allows me to go beyond the surface, to explore the deeper circumstances, the systemic failures, and the emotional weight of what these communities endure. I am not interested in sensationalising suffering or assigning blame to common people, whether they are from one side of the border or the other. My focus is on revealing how both states have failed their people, allowing these inhuman acts to persist.

By not showing violence overtly, I invite the viewer to pause and reflect – to feel the tension and pain that lives just outside the frame. In many ways, the absence of violence becomes louder than its direct depiction. It speaks to the normalisation of brutality and to the quiet, ongoing trauma endured by those who live in the shadow of the border.

National security is important to every nation. However, using it as a blanket justification for the repeated killing and torture of civilians, often due to mistaken identity, raises serious ethical questions. In many cases along the Bangladesh-India border, those targeted are not threats, but ordinary people: farmers, labourers, or children caught in an identity issue.

If we consider India’s borders with countries like Nepal, Bhutan, or Myanmar, we rarely see such incidents. This disparity highlights that the violence along the Bangladesh border is not about security – it is deeply entangled in the region’s historical, political, and communal tensions. National security should never become a tool to normalise human rights violations or overlook systemic failures.

The constant surveillance, militarisation, and use of excessive force in the name of protecting the border reflect a troubling misuse of state power. It also reflects the failure to recognise the humanity of those living in the borderlands – people who often share cultural, linguistic and familial ties across the divide. Understanding the geopolitics here is crucial, but so is acknowledging the lives being lost in its name.

When I first began working on this story, I presented my findings in Kolkata. Many of those present, including intellectuals, were shocked to learn the extent of the violence. Yet, we live just 60-70 kilometres from the Bangladesh border. This speaks volumes about how disconnected mainstream India is from what happens in the border areas.

Mainstream public attention in India is dominated by entertainment, sports, and the politics of votes. Issues from remote border areas rarely enter public discourse unless they become part of a national issue. Moreover, because Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country, empathy for those affected is often absent, even among so-called progressive circles. The media’s absence on the issue is the most critical factor as people are not aware of the issue.

A friend once saw my photographs and dismissed the victims as smugglers, not realising that the majority of them were Indian civilians simply caught in arbitrary violence. Unfortunately, this prejudice is widespread. The border population is seen as marginal and expendable, and their stories are rarely acknowledged.

Only a few organisations, like MASUM, have had the courage to speak out consistently over decades. The national media largely ignores these incidents. In West Bengal, where these events unfold, there is little outrage but just apathy as the population cannot sync with the stress, tensions and feelings with the border people. That silence speaks louder than the violence itself.

The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime in August 2024 and India’s subsequent decision to seal the entire Bangladesh-India border had a profound impact on the border people I have been documenting. While regime change is both a national and international matter, India justified sealing the border by citing potential unrest and instability in the region. There was a real fear of mass migration or violence spilling across the border, and unfortunately, some of those fears materialised – killings and heightened tension along the border followed.

What struck me most was the shift in perception among the border people I have been following. Historically, many of them felt a strong emotional and cultural connection to Bangladesh. But after the regime change, that affinity began to fade. I spoke to many people who had once supported Hasina’s government and now expressed disillusionment. Others, like myself, who were critical of the regime, saw the transition as an opportunity for change, although cautiously.

This shift in sentiment revealed something new to me: the deep, often complex political consciousness of borderland communities. In particular, there were many incidents in which I personally witnessed the loot of farming products by Bangladeshis. Many farmlands belonging to Indian farmers are over the fence adjacent to farmlands owned by Bangladeshis, where BSF cannot have the authority. The opportunity to loot gradually developed a local level of antipathy towards Bangladeshis.  Their attitudes are shaped not just by geography, but by lived experience, fear, hope, and a long history of being caught between two states.

Following the recent student-led uprising in Bangladesh and the resulting regime change, tensions along the border have shifted in subtle but significant ways. I initially feared a surge in migration leading to killings. Those fears remain until the political situation in Bangladesh is stabilised. There was also concern about cross-border criminal migration or political asylum seekers attempting to destabilise the new regime, but so far, that scenario hasn’t unfolded. Still, the possibility remains, and it adds to the volatility of the region. The two killings on the Bangladeshi side, has proved that tensions still persist.

The real burden of these political shifts falls on the border communities. Their lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, as they are often the first to come under suspicion by the BSF, even when they are entirely uninvolved in any wrongdoing. They live with constant fear of being misidentified, of becoming pawns in a broader geopolitical conflict.

On the Indian side, I have noticed a growing wave of Hindu nationalist ideology among border people, which has eroded historical empathy for Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi border residents, too, show signs of rising ultranationalism. These sentiments are troubling given the deep familial, cultural, and historical ties that once connected both sides. The recent tensions have left a scar on those relationships, and healing will take time.

A Bengali refugee has two lives – one, the person was born in East Pakistan, and the other, when the person began a new life in West Bengal, India.

The border is not merely a line etched across the land, but it is in the heart of the people on both sides of the border. It is a deep, unhealed wound left by the British. It stands as a postcolonial scar, born of decisions made by foreign powers who didn’t fully grasp – or didn’t care about – the human cost of drawing arbitrary lines through a shared culture, language and history.

My grandfather and his close Muslim friend once travelled freely between Barisal and Kolkata for business, never imagining a future in which that freedom would sever their friendship. One day, without warning, he was forced to leave everything he had and the same of my maternal grandfather – his home, his community – and resettle in West Bengal as a refugee, starting over with nothing. Likewise, families like the Ispahanis, who had built lives and businesses in Kolkata, were uprooted and compelled to move east, abandoning their homes and legacies.

Even today, the disparity continues. As an Indian, I can still visit Bangladesh with a visa, but the  Bangladeshis have restrictions. That asymmetry speaks volumes about the continued effects of Partition.

Did writers like Hasan Azizul Huq or Bibhutibhushan ever imagine that their beloved Bengal would be so irreversibly split that they could no longer visit their native places without a passport?

My mother was raised in a Muslim family in Chattogram, yet she never returned to reconnect with the family she left behind; communication had been cut off entirely because they were forced to survive in an alien land, and didn’t have time to even think of contacting them. This personal history mirrors that of millions on both sides who were torn from their homes, their pasts, and their identities.

The border is more than geography – it is memory, loss, and a continuing reminder of Partition that shape lives decades later.

The wounds of Partition continue to shape present-day reality in deeply painful and complex ways. The border not only divided land, it tore apart families, cultures, and shared history. In Bengal, once a cradle of Sufism and religious harmony, the legacy of co-existence has been fractured. What emerged in its place is a deep-rooted mistrust, and in many cases, open hostility shaped by decades of political narratives and historical trauma.

The emotional and cultural bonds that once connected people across the region were severed abruptly, leaving scars that have been passed down through generations. Partition planted seeds of religious hatred and animosity that have since grown into widespread communal suspicion, turning neighbours into strangers. What was once a diverse and syncretic society is now marked by borders not only on maps but in minds and hearts.

This is particularly visible in the post Hasina situation in Bangladesh and West Bengal. These are not abstract consequences – they play out daily in the lives of borderland communities, who live with surveillance, suspicion, and the weight of a history that never healed. The spirit of Bengal’s religious tolerance has not just been lost; it has been actively eroded. Rebuilding that fabric feels increasingly out of reach in the face of political polarisation and continued violence.

Religious identity plays a significant role in shaping the violence and discrimination experienced along the border, especially for Muslims. Many of the border guards posted along the Bangladesh-India fence are from conflict-ridden areas like Kashmir, and there is often an unspoken sense of vengeance or mistrust that influences their behaviour. This, combined with the growing influence of Hindu nationalist ideology within the security forces, creates a hostile atmosphere where Muslims are routinely treated with suspicion. Caste dynamics are less overtly visible in the conduct of the BSF.

Resistance in the borderlands often takes quiet, everyday forms – small acts of defiance that assert dignity and survival in the face of constant surveillance and control. I have witnessed many such moments where local people push back against the overbearing behaviour of security forces. These acts aren’t about challenging national security, but about standing up to the arbitrary authority and humiliation often inflicted on them.

I have personally intervened in situations where the BSF displayed a bossy or demeaning attitude towards locals, helping people assert themselves with resistance. These acts may seem small, but in a region where fear is the norm, they represent profound courage.

Such resilience underscores how border people navigate life with remarkable strength, resisting not only militarisation but also the dehumanisation that comes with being treated like outsiders on their soil.

I hope “The Bloodiest Border” challenges the dominant narratives that justify border violence, and exposes the deep historical and political failures that have allowed it to persist. This story is not simply about isolated incidents of brutality; it Is about understanding the legacy of Partition, the postcolonial rupture that still shapes lives in the borderlands, and the systemic neglect and impunity that define the region’s governance today.

India’s increasing political dominance over Bangladesh, especially in the post-Hasina era, will likely escalate, shaped by both regional geopolitics and economic interests.  I want this story to spark dialogue around those costs and expose the gap in current policymaking. A senior Indian official once told me that if more people understood the lived realities and historical context presented in my work, it could lead to better, more humane border management. Yet, he also admitted that no dedicated committee exists within the Indian government to study or address these nuanced issues.

In the past, Bangladesh failed to address and resolve this issue strongly with India, and chances are bleak now and in future.

Ultimately, I aim for this story to contribute to the development of public policy in both India and Bangladesh, facilitating a shift prioritising human rights, recognising shared histories, and moving away from the reactive militarisation of borders. The way the border haats operate.●