A 25-year-old Bangladeshi man was shot dead by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) on Tuesday last week. Along the border shared between our two nations, such incidents have become all too common. Which is extremely disappointing considering the rich history of friendship between India and Bangladesh.
Our closest neighbour, India played a pivotal role in our independence and our present development. But that is exactly what makes border violence, almost always waged by the BSF, so unacceptable.
While it is understandable that border patrol can be prone to escalation, and in certain cases cannot even be avoided, it is also true that such indiscriminate killing implies a dangerous level of callousness and lack of action on the part of India to rein in trigger-happy officers. There have been repeated promises from the Indian government that they would mitigate border killings, but such promises have resulted in next to nothing.
The world will never forget the image of the deceased body of 15-year-old Felani Khatun hanging on a barbed wire border fence -- an ongoing court case where Felani’s family has yet to receive any semblance of justice or closure.
The Indian government needs to teach BSF to exercise restraint, and if that fails, those responsible for opening fire without any good reason needs to be brought to book and have the appropriate punitive measures taken against them.
Border killings present a silent form of injustice that seldom sees any form of action taken against it. This needs to end.
