Indian MP Urges Foreign Minister to Recover Two Women Pushed Into Bangladesh

The case highlights the ongoing vulnerability of residents in Assam's border districts to informal cross-border expulsions, a process that lacks formal diplomatic resolution mechanisms.

Indian Member of Parliament Gaurav Gogoi has formally appealed to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to intervene in the cases of two women from Assam who were reportedly pushed across the border into Bangladesh, according to The Hindu.

Gogoi, a Congress MP representing Kaliabor constituency in Assam, made the appeal directly to Jaishankar, requesting that India's foreign policy apparatus be engaged to secure the women's return. The specific circumstances under which the two women were pushed into Bangladesh were not detailed in available public statements, and the names of the individuals have not been confirmed in official releases.

The term "pushed" in this context refers to an informal and extrajudicial practice in which individuals are forced across an international border without legal process. Such incidents have been documented along the India-Bangladesh border in Assam, West Bengal, and Meghalaya, and have been reported on both sides of that frontier.

Assam shares a 263-kilometer border with Bangladesh, according to the Assam government's own administrative records. This boundary, established after the 1947 partition of British India and redrawn following Bangladesh's independence in 1971, remains a zone of movement for both documented and undocumented migrants, and is monitored by India's Border Security Force.

The India-Bangladesh relationship has faced a period of diplomatic adjustment since the removal of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, following mass protests in Dhaka. An interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been managing Bangladesh since that transition, and relations between the two governments have required recalibration across multiple issue areas, including border management and the status of Indian nationals and religious minorities in Bangladesh.

Border pushback incidents involving Indian citizens present a specific diplomatic challenge because they require coordination between state-level authorities in Assam, India's central government, and the Bangladesh government. There is no standing bilateral mechanism specifically designed to resolve such individual cases rapidly, according to publicly available treaty documentation between the two countries.

Gogoi's appeal to Jaishankar reflects the procedural pathway available to opposition MPs when state-level remedies are considered insufficient: escalating cases to the Ministry of External Affairs, which holds authority over consular and diplomatic engagement with foreign governments.

The Ministry of External Affairs had not issued a public response to Gogoi's appeal as of the date of this report. What would clarify the status of the two women is a formal acknowledgment from either the Indian or Bangladeshi government confirming their location and legal standing in Bangladesh.

Similar cases in recent years have been resolved through a combination of BSF coordination with Bangladesh's Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and diplomatic-level communications. The timeline for such resolutions has varied from days to months depending on the political context at the time of the incident, according to reporting by The Hindu and other Indian publications on prior cases.

Assam has been a focal point for border and citizenship questions in India more broadly, partly because it was the site of the National Register of Citizens update process completed in 2019, which left approximately 1.9 million people off the final list, according to official NRC data published by the Assam government. That process heightened public sensitivity to issues of cross-border identity and displacement in the state.

The two women at the center of Gogoi's appeal remain unaccounted for in any public statement from Bangladesh's interim government. Gogoi has not specified a deadline by which he expects a response from Jaishankar's ministry.