Troubles in the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar trijunction need sensitive handling

Sudeep Chakravarti

A part of Bangladesh’s southern Chittagong Hill Tracts, or CHT, lit up with anger on September 23, when news broke of the gangrape of a schoolgirl of the Indigenous Marma tribe. It was an eerie replay of violence of similar kind in this sensitive tri-junction where India, Bangladesh and Myanmar share borders, ethnic overlap—and histories of hugely disproportionate state response in the name of security.

Security forces were quick to blame tribal organisations for instigating protests that turned violent. Four civilians have since been killed by Bangladesh security forces who in turn claimed that both army and police personnel were injured. Curfew was enforced, tourism stopped, and visitors denied access to the area.

It did not prevent gory images of civilian deaths and injuries, burning homes, and violent conflict from reaching elsewhere in Bangladesh, the region, and the world. Media, both regular and ‘social’ overrode government and security blackouts, communiques, and platitudes.

CHT is to Bangladesh—and earlier, to Pakistan—what northeastern India was for the longest time to India: a place of inconvenient truths, and inconvenient identities and aspirations of people against which nationalistic and majoritarian government narratives severely pushed back. Successive governments in Bangladesh have practiced or overlooked the vilest ‘othering’ in CHT in the name of national interest.

Indigenous-versus-settler blowouts have taken place with regularity over the years. It happened more recently in September 2024; and it happened earlier that year in April, after a series of spectacular bank robberies by suspected rebels of the Kuki National Front, or KNF, in the Bandarban area of CHT. The response included a massive clampdown by security forces and ready application of a provision of the penal code—an inheritance of a 19th century British system and widely misused across the subcontinent since 1947—that permits cases against unnamed persons. This clubbing together of several dozen unnamed suspects, even several hundred in some insta