India \’watching\’ Chinese defence minister\’s BD visit

India says it will closely watch the Dhaka visit of Chinese defence minister Chang Wanquan to Dhaka later this month.
The Chinese minister’s visit follows the visit to China by Bangladesh’s Chief of Army Staff, General Abu Belal Muhammad Shafiul Huq, in December last year.
During Belal's visit, both sides took note of developments in Sino-Bangladesh military relations since the two countries established diplomatic ties 40 years ago, and pledged deeper cooperation in the future.
"We are trying to figure out how much deeper military relations between Dhaka and Beijing will go," said a top official at the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi.
The official was not willing to be named, however.
China, like the USA, had sided with the Yahya Khan-led Pakistani military junta during Bangladesh’s independence strggles in 1971, but subsequently built up a steady relationship with Dhaka when Bangladesh in the times of Ziaur Rahman and H M Ershad.
Military relations between the two countries have been bolstered by the fact that China is now Bangladesh’s largest supplier of military equipment.
Since 2010, Beijing has supplied Dhaka with five maritime patrol vessels, two corvettes, 44 tanks, and 16 fighter jets, as well as surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
That is in addition to new Ming-class submarines that Bangladesh ordered from China in 2013. The submarines will perhaps join the Bangladeshi fleet by end of 2016, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said, according to bdnews24.com. -bz
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Source: The Financial Express


 

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