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Nahid Islam, convener of the National Citizen Party and the opposition chief whip in parliament, has called the eviction of Bengali-speaking Muslims in India's Assam "fundamentally Bangladesh's fight" and asked Dhaka to publish a white paper on the people pushed back across the border.

The MP made the demand in a Facebook post on Sunday night, five days after ScrollBeat reported the demolition of homes in three Assam districts. He wrote that more than 1,100 Bengali Muslim families lost their homes and more than 10 mosques were demolished in the drives of 17 and 18 October, and that the same pattern had run through 33 operations since 2021, displacing more than 22,000 families.

The state administration gives a lower figure. It says close to 1,000 families were removed across Nagaon, Hojai and Golaghat, and that more than 638 hectares of protected forest land were cleared in a week. About 314 hectares were cleared in the Lutumari reserve forest in Nagaon on 18 October alone, where roughly 550 families were affected, according to figures reported by Prothom Alo.

Assam's government says the settlements stood on forest land and that the operation followed court orders. Forest officials said residents were warned by loudspeaker announcements in August and that about 90 per cent of those listed as encroachers left before the excavators arrived. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said his administration had shown the "fierce face" of development.

Residents and minority organisations dispute that account. The All Assam Minorities Students' Union says the families removed from Lutumari had been resettled there by the state in 1973, and that notices had not yet been served on people of other faiths living in the same area. It alleges that more than 1,000 homes and several mosques were demolished, a claim the administration has not confirmed. Local residents have also said they approached the Gauhati High Court and received no relief.

Nahid's post went beyond the immediate operation. He traced the dispute to the line drawn at Nagaon a century ago, to the transfer of Karimganj and Sylhet to Assam in 1874, to the 1947 referendum in which Sylhet voted to join East Bengal, and to the 1961 language movement in Silchar, where 11 people were killed in police firing. Families in Sylhet, he wrote, still treat the Barak valley as kin rather than as foreign news.

He argued that the National Register of Citizens, which left out 1.9 million people, and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which created a path to citizenship for non-Muslims, had combined with informal pushbacks to leave Bengali-speaking Muslims without secure status. He said the Assam chief minister had himself acknowledged that people are pushed across the border at night where Indian border guards are not on patrol.

The demands on Dhaka are specific. Nahid wants a white paper on push-in and on the border situation, a formal declaration that Bangladesh will not accept anyone pushed in or forcibly repatriated, and the issue raised at the United Nations and other international forums. He also warned that communal unrest inside Bangladesh would deepen the persecution of Bengali Muslims in Assam, and said minority communities here must be protected for that reason.

His intervention puts a sensitive border question back into national politics at a time when the government's public position has been limited to border patrols and diplomatic letters. The foreign ministry has not responded to his demands and has not said whether it will publish any document. There is still no confirmed figure for how many people have crossed or been pushed into Bangladesh in recent weeks.

The numbers behind the eviction remain contested in Assam itself. Independent verification of the demolished structures, including the mosques, has not been published, and it is not clear whether every demolition fell within what the court orders allowed. Nor has the state published a rehabilitation plan, a list of displaced families or details of compensation.

Several tests lie ahead. The Assam administration may extend the drive to other reserve forests, and displaced families may return to court. In Dhaka, the question is whether the government answers Nahid with a formal position or leaves the issue to the border force and routine diplomacy. The next few weeks should show which way it goes.

Bangladesh is preparing to make companies disclose who really owns and controls them, the first major rewrite of the Companies Act in 35 years and a direct attempt to close a gap that officials say has hidden the real owners of banks, telecoms firms and shell companies.

The commerce ministry's draft, the Companies (Third Amendment) Act 2026, would insert a beneficial-ownership clause into the 1994 law, Prothom Alo reported. Under the proposed section 34(a), the person whose name appears on the share register would no longer automatically count as the owner. Anyone who directly or indirectly owns or controls a company, or who can influence the appointment and removal of directors or the running of its daily business, would also have to be declared.

Ownership would have to be declared within 30 days of any change, in a prescribed form filed with the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies and Firms. Prothom Alo reported that failing to declare would carry a fine of up to Tk 50,000, with Tk 100 added for every day the failure continues. The Business Standard reported that a person who conceals beneficial ownership would also lose legal rights over the shares.

The draft contains about 40 changes and would be the biggest revision of company law since it was enacted, Prothom Alo reported. Ministry officials say the aim is to make ownership transparent, move registration and records online and cut administrative complexity for businesses.

The gap has already been tested in court. Prothom Alo reported that International Voice, an international gateway telecoms company, owed about Tk 126 crore in dues while its ownership was shown in the names of three people who knew nothing about the transfer. In March 2025 the High Court ordered the telecoms regulator and the Criminal Investigation Department to identify the real owner within 90 days. The newspaper reported that the investigation pointed to former Awami League MP Shamim Osman and members of his family.

The report also cited S Alam Group, saying chairman Mohammad Saiful Alam and his family held about 30 per cent of Islami Bank and about 22 per cent of Social Islami Bank, directly and through other entities, with several relatives on the boards. The group later drew large loans from the banks that have not been recovered, the newspaper said.

Under the draft, the registrar could share ownership and management information with the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit, the Anti-Corruption Commission, law enforcement agencies and foreign authorities on lawful request. Companies would not be able to refuse on grounds of confidentiality or lack of consent, The Business Standard reported. The changes follow recommendations from the financial intelligence unit, which did not exist when the present law was written.

An inter-ministerial meeting chaired by Commerce Minister Khandakar Abdul Muktadir is expected within two weeks, after which the draft goes to the cabinet, then to the law ministry for vetting and finally to parliament, Prothom Alo reported. The ministry held a consultation with stakeholders on 7 September.

Fazlul Hoque, administrator of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told Prothom Alo that the law should have been updated years ago and that more than a decade of work had gone into it. He said he expected this amendment to pass. He told The Business Standard that formalising the registrar's role and moving its services online would matter as much as the text itself.

The draft would also take the High Court out of routine company housekeeping. Changes to a company's memorandum, including its objectives or a merger, would be approved by the registrar instead, with a right of appeal to the government within 30 days on payment of a fee. Records, notices and contracts could be kept electronically, and share transfers would need physical or digital identity checks. The minimum paid-up capital for a one-person company would fall to Tk 5 lakh from Tk 25 lakh.

Several questions remain. The final text has not been published, and the cabinet and parliament can still change it. Officials have not explained how the registrar would verify declarations that run through holding companies abroad, or how quickly it could process them. The fines are small compared with the sums involved in the cases cited, and it is not yet clear whether they would deter a nominee arrangement.

If passed, the law would cover existing companies as well as new ones, and they would have to file fresh declarations. The immediate tests are the inter-ministerial meeting, then whether the cabinet sends the draft to parliament in the current session.