The Price of Obedience: Why Bangladesh Is Still Chasing the Boeing Deal

Article by Aminul Hoque Polash

This is not really a story about aircraft. It is a story about power, continuity, and political submission. When a government presses ahead with a costly Boeing purchase in the middle of economic pain, despite fuel stress, power shortages, and pressure on households, the real question is not whether the country needs planes. It is why this government seems so determined to honour a deal born under the Yunus interim administration, even as ordinary Bangladeshis are asked to bear the cost.

There is a temptation to read the proposed purchase of 14 Boeing aircraft as a standard policy choice: a government modernising its national carrier, thinking about routes, fleets and long-term aviation strategy. That reading is too polite. It misses what this decision is really beginning to reveal.

Because this is not happening in normal times. Bangladesh is not awash with comfort or fiscal room. The economy is under strain. Families are feeling the pressure of rising costs. Energy insecurity has fed a broader sense of vulnerability. For many people, daily life is now shaped by worry: worry about prices, worry about power, worry about work, worry about whether the state is still capable of protecting the basics. Against that backdrop, the push to keep the Boeing process alive does not look like ordinary planning. It looks like political obedience.

That suspicion is not baseless. The trade agreement signed with the United States under Muhammad Yunus’s interim government explicitly tied Bangladesh to increased purchases of American goods, including aircraft and energy. Reuters reported that under the deal Bangladesh agreed to boost purchases of US products, with Biman set to buy at least 14 Boeing jets, while also committing to major energy purchases over 15 years.

That matters, because it changes the meaning of the current government’s conduct. This is no longer just a fleet decision. It is part of a political inheritance.

And that inheritance was not hidden. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman himself said that BNP and Jamaat had been informed of the trade deal before the election and gave their consent. In other words, the current government cannot plausibly present itself as an innocent bystander burdened by an agreement it never accepted. Its own foreign minister has publicly framed the deal as something the two parties knew about and agreed to before taking office.

That is why the Boeing push deserves to be read politically, not merely commercially.

Why? Because the deeper logic appears to be about reassuring external power centres and preserving political security at home. The Yunus administration signed a far-reaching arrangement with Washington that went well beyond tariffs. It opened market access, eased non-tariff barriers and embedded large scale future purchases of American goods. The government that followed now appears less interested in reassessing that framework than in proving that it is a reliable custodian of it.

That is the heart of the matter. Tarique Rahman’s government increasingly looks not like a rupture from the Yunus era, but like its extension by other means. The faces have changed. The electoral cover has changed. But on this central question, the line of continuity is hard to miss. The interim government made the commitment. The elected government is now moving to honour it.

And it is doing so while the country suffers.

That is what gives this issue its moral force. A mother standing in a market with too little money does not care about the diplomatic elegance of a trade bargain. A farmer worrying about fuel and fertiliser does not experience “policy continuity” as a virtue. A shopkeeper dealing with outages and weak demand does not see a Boeing purchase as national progress. They see something simpler and harsher: a state prepared to satisfy powerful interests while its own people absorb the pain.

This is where the language of “development” becomes dangerous. Governments often hide hard political choices behind the language of modernisation. They speak of capacity, competitiveness and future growth. But development without public protection is not vision. It is performance. And when a government keeps faith with an external bargain more faithfully than it keeps faith with its own citizens, people notice.

That is why the Boeing issue matters. It exposes a style of rule in which public suffering is treated as manageable, but elite commitments are treated as sacred. It suggests a government that is less an expression of popular will than a mechanism for servicing prior understandings and vested interests. That is a harsh conclusion, but the government’s own behaviour is what gives it force.

A people’s government would have begun from the opposite direction. It would have asked whether the country could morally defend such a purchase at a time of visible distress. It would have asked whether a politically controversial agreement signed in the last days of an interim administration deserved fresh democratic scrutiny. It would have asked whether continuity, in this case, was wisdom or surrender.

Instead, Bangladesh is being asked to accept obedience as a strategy. And that may be the clearest sign yet that this government is not truly governing for the people but managing the obligations of others.

Views expressed are those of the author(s)