Border Security Force chief Daljit Singh Chaudhary said on Thursday that infiltration along India’s border with Bangladesh had “gone down substantially” since a political crisis led to a change of government in Dhaka in August, The Hindu reported.

Chaudhary said that the Border Guards Bangladesh had assisted the Indian forces in maintaining peace along the border throughout the crisis. Border Guards Bangladesh is the paramilitary force responsible for the country’s border security.

Chaudhary held talks with his Bangladeshi counterpart between February 16 and February 20. These were the first director general-level talks between the two sides after the Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh was ousted in August.

Hasina resigned as the prime minister and fled to India on August 5 after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

Two days after her ouster, reports had said that the Border Security Force had stopped about 500 persons from Bangladesh from entering India through the bordering Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal.

India shares a 4,096 km-border with Bangladesh, the bordering states being West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura.

At the meeting earlier this week, Chaudhary also said that the Border Security Force had raised the problem of attacks on its personnel.

“At times, taking advantage of night cover, some miscreants try to enter our territory by breaching the fence,” Chaudhary was quoted as saying. “They try to overwhelm and overpower the BSF personnel, though we strictly adhere to the protocol of graded escalation.”

He added: “We do not use unnecessary lethal force against anybody but when the circumstances come, in self-defence we need to use lethal force as a last resort and we exercise that power with full restraint.”

Major General Ashrafuzzaman Siddiqui, the director-general of Border Guards Bangladesh, said that reports of attacks on Hindus and other religious minorities in his country were exaggerated, The New Indian Express reported. The law and order incidents were part of a political problem, he was quoted as saying.

“To be honest, such attacks on minorities per se did not happen,” The Hindu quoted Siddiqui as saying. “The substantiation of that was the recently held Durga Puja. One of the most peacefully organised Hindu festivals.”

Siddiqui added that law enforcement agencies in Bangladesh had been “very precisely and strictly” tasked by Dhaka “so that the Hindu community could perform the festival”.

“To be more elaborate on this, BGB jurisdiction is within 8 km of the international boundary, we have several puja mandaps where BGB personnel provided security,” he said. “Overall, the law-and-order situation was not on minority, it may be some kind of political problem.”

Following the collapse of the Hasina government, several parts of Bangladesh reported incidents of violence against religious minorities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 9 urged Muhammad Yunus, the head of Bangladesh’s interim government, to ensure the safety of Hindus and other minorities. Yunus, on his part, had also claimed that reports of attacks on religious minorities in Bangladesh had been exaggerated.

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