According to reports, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) attempted to push the group into Bangladesh on June 5. Bangladesh’s Border Guard (BGB) refused to accept them, leaving them trapped in the strip of territory between the two states. Only after prolonged tensions and diplomatic pressure were they reportedly taken back by Indian authorities.

Among those stranded was a family from North 24 Parganas in West Bengal. Local reports suggest that the father, Shamsul, had spent years working as a vegetable trader in India and possessed Indian identity documents. Yet this apparently made little difference. For seventy hours, his family occupied a political vacuum: citizens on paper, but disposable in practice.

The incident is not merely a humanitarian failure. It reveals something deeper about the contemporary politics of citizenship in South Asia and beyond.

Across the world, citizenship has increasingly ceased to function as a universal guarantee of rights. Instead, it has become a mechanism of classification and exclusion. States reserve for themselves the power to decide who belongs, who is suspect, who is legal, and who can be discarded.

This tendency is hardly unique to India. From the Mediterranean to the US-Mexico border, from the detention centres of Europe to refugee camps across Asia, modern states are investing unprecedented resources into policing human mobility. The language differs — national security, border management, demographic protection — but the underlying logic remains remarkably similar.

People who sell their labour across borders are treated as threats, while capital crosses those same borders with extraordinary freedom.

Marxist political theory has long emphasised that borders do not simply regulate movement; they also help organise labour markets. Capitalism depends simultaneously on mobility and restriction. Workers are encouraged to move when their labour is needed and prevented from moving when they become politically inconvenient.

This contradiction is particularly visible in South Asia, where millions of workers, traders, and migrants have historically moved across territories that long predate the borders established by Partition. The creation of modern nation-states did not eliminate these social and economic connections. It merely transformed them into administrative problems.

As economic insecurity deepens, governments increasingly turn citizenship into a political spectacle. Questions of employment, inflation, public services, agrarian distress, and inequality become more difficult to address. Questions of belonging become easier. The figure of the “outsider” emerges as a convenient political object onto which broader anxieties can be projected.

The people stranded at Panchagarh were not responsible for unemployment, rising prices, or social instability. Nor did two small children sleeping under the open sky constitute a threat to national security. Yet they found themselves caught within a machinery that increasingly prioritises territorial control over human welfare.

The tragedy of the border is that it transforms administrative uncertainty into human suffering. A person may possess documents, a work history, a family, and a community, yet still find their existence suspended by bureaucratic discretion. Citizenship becomes less a right than a conditional status, revocable in practice even when recognised in law.

The Panchagarh incident also exposes the limits of nationalist thinking. Neither Indian nor Bangladeshi workers benefit from the production of statelessness. The victims of exclusion are overwhelmingly poor people whose labour sustains the economies on both sides of the border. Nationalist politics invites them to see each other as rivals, while the conditions shaping their lives — precarious employment, shrinking welfare provisions, rising inequality, and intensified surveillance — remain strikingly similar.

This is why the left cannot approach such incidents merely as humanitarian crises. Humanitarian concern is necessary, but insufficient. The deeper question concerns the political order that repeatedly produces these situations.

A socialist politics begins from a simple premise: human dignity cannot depend on administrative categories alone. Rights cannot be contingent upon the changing calculations of border regimes. The value of a person’s life does not derive from a passport, an identity card, or a bureaucratic determination of belonging.

For seventy hours, ten people remained trapped in a place officially designated as belonging to no one. Yet their predicament reveals a larger truth about our political moment. The no-man’s land is not merely a strip of territory at the edge of two states. It is increasingly becoming a condition imposed upon vulnerable populations everywhere — people who are essential as workers but expendable as human beings.

The challenge before the left is not simply to demand a more humane border. It is to challenge the social order that repeatedly produces human beings whose rights can be suspended at the edge of a map.