How the 'frenemy' narrative justifies coercion against Bangladesh

In a recent episode of "Conversation with Sabir Mustafa" on The Business Standard, Indian senior journalist and public policy analyst Pratim Ranjan Bose offered a portrait of Bangladesh as a strategic liability that is both revealing and dangerous. 

Bangladesh is a "frenemy" in Indian strategic circles, he claims. Illegal Bangladeshi immigration was a major reason Mamata Banerjee lost the West Bengal elections. There is increasing fiscal pressure from social security given to non-citizens. And Bangladesh will soon face the crisis of its own citizens demanding to return. 

Each of these claims deserves hard engagement — not because Bose is a policymaker, but because the framework he articulates is increasingly driving actual Indian policy, and its consequences are arriving this very week at Bangladesh's borders.

The "frenemy" label, on first reading, presents itself as a frank disclosure of how Indian strategic circles see Bangladesh. It is actually something more specific: a demand that Bangladesh align comprehensively with Indian interests, and that any exercise of independent foreign policy constitutes unreliability. 

The actual history inverts this completely. Bangladesh has accommodated Indian interests to a degree that often defied its own strategic rationality — water-sharing agreements during periods of total Indian hydrological leverage, security cooperation even as India stalled indefinitely on the Teesta treaty, transit access that transformed logistics across India's landlocked northeast.

According to official data, in the 2024–25 fiscal year, Bangladesh's trade deficit with India hit $7.86 billion. Bangladesh imported goods worth $9.62 billion from India while exporting only $1.76 billion in return. Bangladesh carries this burden while remaining India's single most important bilateral trade partner in South Asia. 

The "frenemy" label is not an analysis of what Bangladesh has done. It is an advanced justification for coercion when Bangladesh exercises basic sovereign prerogatives — engaging China for infrastructure, maintaining Gulf relationships and declining to subordinate its foreign policy to Delhi. 

That is not strategic analysis. It is hegemonic entitlement disguised as it.

The immigration narrative that Bose deploys operates within a similar logic of selective evidence masquerading as data. Estimates of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in India range from 3 million to 20 million — a variance so extreme it signals the absence of real data. 

The 2001 census identified approximately 3 million people of Bangladeshi origin in India, while a "20 million" figure circulates primarily in BJP political speeches. 

Analysts like Bose avoid invoking that specific inflated figure but achieve the same effect through a different method: they substitute verified demographic data with anecdotal accounts of "thousands and thousands" of people allegedly gathering at the border, punctuating their claims with small, localised detention figures — such as the "250 or 300" individuals recently detained in Gujarat — to construct a narrative of massive crisis without statistical foundation. 

Yet, what Bose entirely omits is structural: Migration to India happens because there is labour demand in India. But India and Bangladesh have no bilateral labour agreement. There is no legal pathway for a Bangladeshi construction worker to enter India for employment and return home. India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has refused, repeatedly, to formalise labour mobility with Bangladesh. 

In the absence of legal channels, workers use informal ones — the documented pattern across every migration corridor where labour demand exists but legal pathways have been withheld. 

India needs Bangladeshi labour in its construction sites, brick kilns, and agricultural fields. It simply refuses to bear the cost of formalising that arrangement. 

The "fiscal pressure" Bose describes is a crisis India has manufactured through its own policy choices, and responsibility lies squarely with the party that holds both the power and the economic incentive to change it. This manufactured crisis has now become a unilateral expulsion operation with no international precedent in its scale and brazenness. 

Bose's prediction that, "Bangladesh will face the crisis of its own citizens demanding to return" is not neutral forecasting. It describes something already happening — a crisis India has created and is dumping across the border without negotiation, due process, or any bilateral agreement. 

BGB headquarters records show at least 2,303 people were pushed into Bangladesh between 7 May last year and 26 January this year. Of them, 126 were Indian nationals and 38 were Myanmar nationals.

The operations are legally groundless: collective expulsions without individual assessments violate the ICCPR, which India has signed. Human Rights Watch's 2026 World Report documented that those expelled included impoverished Bengali Muslim workers from West Bengal and Assam, swept up because they spoke Bangla, were Muslim, and lacked documents during police raids across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Delhi. 

Since Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, those outside the scope of the CAA have been labelled "infiltrators" and handed to the BSF, with Indian Muslim citizens at risk of being reclassified as Bangladeshi and expelled. 

Bose's framing implicitly assumes that those being "returned" are Bangladeshi nationals reclaiming their homeland. The data tells a different story. Among the 2,303 people pushed across the border, BGB headquarters documents that at least 126 were verified Indian nationals, meaning India was expelling its own citizens too across an international border. 

Human Rights Watch's report adds another layer: those expelled included Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, impoverished Bangali Muslim workers from West Bengal and Assam who lacked documents, and Indian Muslim citizens administratively reclassified as Bangladeshi for convenience. This is not repatriation. It is a dumping operation that conscripts non-citizens and Indian nationals alike into an Indian domestic political project.

None of this enters Bose's analysis. Acknowledging it would destroy his entire framework of India as a responsible partner and Bangladesh as a source of problems. But the border reveals the actual asymmetry with devastating clarity. 

In the two decades until 2020, the Border Security Force has killed 1,236 Bangladeshi citizens, according to the human rights organisation Odhikar. Ain O Salish Kendra documents 34 killings in 2025 alone — the highest in five years. 

Not a single BSF personnel has ever been prosecuted. Shooting on sight is, in fact, illegal under Indian domestic law, where the maximum sentence for illegal border crossing is seven years' imprisonment. 

The 57th Director General-level BGB-BSF conference opened in New Delhi on June 8. Like the 56 conferences in the past, BGB will present this data. India will promise "non-lethal measures." The pattern will resume, as it has after every conference since the Coordinated Border Management Plan was signed in 2011. 

A neighbour that has killed over a thousand of your civilians in just two decades, renewed the same promises each time, and never prosecuted a single perpetrator, does not have the moral standing to brand your country a "frenemy."

The fiscal argument, reframed without Bose's selective omissions, tells a story of structural exploitation masquerading as benevolence. 

India runs a trade surplus of around $9 billion annually with Bangladesh. Even as political tensions escalated sharply after August 2024, Bangladesh's exports to India grew 12.4% in FY2024-25. So, the economic relationship tilts systematically in India's favour. 

Meanwhile, Bangladesh hosts over 1.3 million Rohingya refugees — the world's largest such population — at an annual humanitarian cost of $934.5 million. Since 2017, the international community has contributed nearly $5.42 billion to the Rohingya response in Bangladesh. India, far more deeply engaged with Naypyidaw, has contributed almost nothing. 

Cox's Bazar's forests have been stripped, its water tables strained, and its host communities placed under sustained economic pressure. The word "Rohingya" does not appear once in Bose's analysis. The portrait of Bangladesh as a fiscal drain on India requires the deliberate erasure of every inconvenient number.

Taken together, Bose's framework constructs a coherent architecture designed to do specific political work: Bangladesh is unreliable. Bangladesh is responsible for India's migration problems. Bangladesh will become an economic burden. The border is a site of Indian security anxiety rather than Indian state violence against Bangladeshi civilians. The fiscal relationship represents Indian generosity strained by Bangladeshi exploitation. 

Each element reinforces the others in a narrative that makes coercion appear as a reluctant response to Bangladeshi failures rather than a calculated choice serving Indian domestic politics. 

Bose is not fringe. The language he uses is the language of mainstream BJP-aligned strategic thinking since August 2024, and it is being translated, right now, into push-in operations, trade restrictions, BSF impunity, and border militarisation. 

Every incident at the border this week — every detention, every expulsion, every killing — carries the intellectual legitimacy that frameworks like Bose's provide.

Bangladesh's response cannot be silence, or the quiet diplomacy of the previous era. The asymmetry must be named explicitly: a country that runs a $9 billion annual surplus with us, kills our civilians at the border with total impunity, conducts mass expulsions including of its own citizens, and frames all of this as Bangladesh's security failure — that country has forfeited the right to define the terms of the friendship. 

What it calls a "frenemy" relationship, the evidence suggests, is something Bangladesh has been patient about for far too long.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a journalist.