The interest has now turned into a signature as Bangladesh is moving towards a major milestone in the field of Islamic banking. A negotiation committee set up by the government in Dhaka has completed a draft contract for a batch of Chinese-built J-10CE fighter aircraft and attack helicopters, which would make it one of the biggest defence purchases in the country's history. The prime minister's adviser for information and broadcasting, Zahed Ur Rahman, said this week that officials had studied the performance of the aircraft carefully after the limited, but intense, India-Pakistan skirmishes last year.

This deal is significant for these reasons and more than just in Bangladesh's airspace. The J-10CE earned fame in May of 2025 when Pakistan claimed to shoot down Indian fighters using the aircraft and Chinese long-range missiles PL-15.The J-10CE acquired fame in May 2025, when Pakistani air force asserted that it had shot down Indian fighters using the aircraft and Chinese long-range missiles PL-15. India has challenged some of those assertions and independent findings have been meager over a year later. However, in the arms business, the perception can often outpace the evidence and in the case of the aircraft, it is definitely the export profile that has benefited. Dhaka is now poised to become the second nation in the world to run such a type, after Islamabad.

For an economy which is still emerging from a shaky period, it's not a trivial amount of money. The total amount for the jets themselves, training of pilots, spare parts, ground infrastructure and years of sustainment is estimated in several reports at two billion dollars, with the bulk of that paid in stages over 10 years instead of in one big bill. That it has to be financed in that form matters because, although Bangladesh's fiscal situation is improving, it's not exactly flush. Growth is under four per cent this year, inflation has remained stubbornly at high-end single figures and the government is in the midst of renegotiation of its lending deal with the International Monetary Fund. Over the last couple of years foreign exchange reserves had been on a downward trend, but now they have turned green with a smile, with the twenty-nine billion dollar threshold reached under IMF accounting conventions, and a ten-year payment structure suggests that Dhaka is sensibly trying to avoid a foreign exchange shock by buying up reserves in a single go.

This is not a new experience for the Bangladesh air force that has been operating Chinese built planes since the 1970s. Sixteen F-7s were bought in 2005 for less than $120 million, which seems like quite a bargain when you compare with today's money, but this was not a sudden thing, it's a thing that has been developing over time. Now, by most accounts over seventy percent of the hardware in Bangladesh's military arsenal is made from China, from submarines to armoured vehicles, naval frigates and possibly now a fourth generation-plus combat jet fleet. That reliance will provide Beijing with an unusually strong hand when it comes to doctrine, pipeline training and long-term maintenance contracts for an aircraft force with a large number of old Cold War F-7 fighters that desperately require replacement, or at least retirement, before capability gaps grow.

With the timing and location being so inconvenient for New Delhi. The planned fleet would be within easy striking range of the Siliguri corridor, a thin sliver of land between the northeast and the rest of India, which has long been considered one of the country's most sensitive strategic pinch points. Indian planners are now considering the possibility of Indian origin PL-15 capable fighters operating concurrently from two fronts, one from Pakistan and another from Bangladesh, which is also in the East. That is quite a different planning problem from dealing with either of the other two and it will likely contribute to discussions that are already underway in New Delhi to speed up further Rafale orders, expand Tejas Mk1A manufacture locally and boost air defence coverage in the eastern region.

There's also a political element. This government, which has been in power since the elections held in February this year, has taken a few steps to mend its relationship with India, which had soured significantly after the previous government's fall in 2024. But all that diplomatic signalling has not slowed the defence procurement drive to Beijing, in fact it has intensified, indicating that the military-industrial ties with China have grown independent of the foreign ministry in Dhaka, to an extent.

Beijing, meanwhile, has been notably tight-lipped about the terms of the deal in public statements, while commentaries have hyped the attention as proof of the strength of China's aerospace industry rather than a geopolitical play. It is worth noting, however, that there's much that's omitted from that frame, including arms sales of this magnitude do not always occur in the context of mere industrial exchanges. They include training relationships, dependency on spares, and years of technicians and advisers integrated into the partner country's armed forces, beyond the lifespan of the aircraft.

The next move will be telling of their intent with the August signing target that they are putting in place. Formal, government-to-government defence deals of this size usually go through multiple rounds of price, financing and delivery schedule negotiations before there is ever a point where the ink meets the paper, and in this case, Beijing hasn't confirmed any of these details. Nevertheless, the trajectory is clearly apparent as a draft. Bangladesh is once again betting on the decades-long defence partnership with China, at the exact time the plane in question is the symbol of the Chinese military's regional credibility and India is trying to rethink how much of its eastern border to focus on which warrants it. At two billion dollars, or a bit over, at twenty jets or twenty-four, the strategic message to the broader region is getting through.