Bangladesh 2036: Two Paths Through a China-India Century
Scenario Analysis · Futura Genesis Center · July 2026
A Note on What This Piece Is
This is a scenario piece, not an evidence brief. Everything in the "Documented Anchors" section below is a sourced, dated fact. Everything in the "Where This Goes" section is the Center's own ten-year extrapolation from those facts — informed judgment about trajectory, not a claim of certainty, and it should be read as such. We are naming this distinction explicitly rather than letting the two registers blur together, because the value of a scenario piece depends on the reader trusting that the anchors are real and the projection is honestly labeled as projection.
Documented Anchors
The regional economic backdrop. China's nominal GDP was approximately $17.79 trillion in 2024, the world's second largest; India's was approximately $3.93 trillion, fifth largest. The IMF's own Article IV projections, alongside S&P Global and Goldman Sachs analyses, put India on track to become the world's third-largest economy by 2027-2028, with combined China-India nominal GDP plausibly reaching $35-40 trillion by 2036 — a combined bloc larger than the US and EU together, under multiple IMF World Economic Outlook trajectories.
Source: IMF World Economic Outlook; IMF Article IV consultations; S&P Global; Goldman Sachs BRICS analyses.
Bangladesh's documented security posture since August 2024. The European Union Agency for Asylum's 2025 country report, alongside multiple think-tank security profiles, documents that Bangladesh hosts operational cells of AQIS (Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent), ABT (Ansarullah Bangla Team), JMB, HuJI-B, and ISIS-linked networks. Bangladesh's Inspector General of Prisons recorded 174 militant-linked prisoners released between August and December 2024, per EUAA 2025. Ansarullah Bangla Team's chief, Jashimuddin Rahmani, was released within months of the interim government taking office, according to a September 2025 paper from the India-based Council for Analysis and Strategic Perspectives (CAPSS).
Source: EUAA 2025 country report; Counter Extremism Project profiles; CAPSS paper, September 2025.
The institutional environment. The interim government lifted the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing on August 28, 2024. Hizb ut-Tahrir — banned in the UK, Germany, and Russia — has held public rallies on Dhaka University and Notre Dame College campuses under the interim period, per EUAA 2025. A government-appointed Constitutional Reform Commission recommended removing secularism from Bangladesh's constitution, reported by The Diplomat in February 2025. Islami Chhatra Shibir won student-union elections at Dhaka University (DUCSU) and Jahangirnagar University in 2025 — a result reported widely, including by the Awami League's own albd.org, whose framing of the result should be read as a partisan account, though the election outcomes themselves are a matter of public record.
Source: EUAA 2025; The Diplomat, February 2025; election results widely reported, including via albd.org.
The refugee and demographic backdrop. Cox's Bazar hosts 1.0-1.2 million stateless Rohingya refugees, with documented radicalization concerns raised by UNHCR and multiple academic studies. Separately, Bangladeshi-origin jihadi operatives have been arrested in northeast India, Malaysia, and elsewhere in the region in recent years — a matter of court and police record, not allegation.
Source: UNHCR; multiple academic studies; regional arrest records.
The economic and social data. Female labour force participation fell from 42.8% (2021-22) to 38.4% (2024-25), per the World Bank and Bangladesh's own Labour Force Survey. Bangladesh's non-performing loan ratio roughly doubled to 35.73% by late 2025, per the Asian Development Bank — among the highest in Asia. 27.1% of Bangladeshi youth are NEET (not in education, employment, or training), 89.6% of them female, per a 2024 GED policy brief and BBS Labour Force Survey. Bangladesh has the highest population density of any large country in the world — a distinct claim from "largest population," which it is not (Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country). China has invested approximately $38 billion in Bangladesh under the Belt and Road Initiative as of 2024.
Source: World Bank; BBS Labour Force Survey; ADB; GED Policy Brief 2024; World Bank population/density rankings; India-Briefing.com, 2024.
Where This Goes: The Center's Reading
Two documented, world-scale trends are converging on a country positioned exactly between them. China and India, individually the world's second and (soon) third-largest economies, are on track to jointly dominate the global economy by the mid-2030s — a genuinely new center of gravity in world affairs. Bangladesh sits geographically at the hinge of that emerging order: between India's northeast, China's Belt-and-Road reach into the Bay of Bengal, and a domestic security environment that the documented facts above show has moved in a specific direction since August 2024 — toward, not away from, greater space for organized Islamist and jihadi-adjacent networks, at the same moment its economic fundamentals (female labour participation, non-performing loans, youth NEET rates) have deteriorated.
None of this required Yunus's government to invent Bangladesh's jihadi networks — AQIS and its peers have documented roots back to at least 2013-2014, predating the current interim period. What the documented record above shows is acceleration: prisoner releases, a lifted party ban, permitted rallies by a group banned across Europe, and a constitutional commission questioning secularism itself, all inside an eighteen-month window. Whether this pattern compounds into what some circulating commentary calls Bangladesh "exporting jihad" at scale by 2036, or whether it plateaus, is genuinely not something the documented record settles — that is a forecast, and this piece labels it as one rather than dressing it in false precision. Specific numeric projections that circulate around this scenario — jihadi headcounts in the low thousands, India-side cost estimates in the tens of billions of dollars, GDP figures for 2036 — are not evidence-based facts; they are the kind of illustrative arithmetic that scenario exercises produce, useful for stress-testing assumptions but not citable as documented projections, and this piece does not adopt any specific figure of that kind as its own claim.
What is defensible as a documented trajectory, without inventing a number to attach to it, is this: a country of 175 million people, at the geographic hinge between the world's two dominant rising economies, has spent its first eighteen months of post-uprising governance visibly loosening — not tightening — the institutional constraints on organized political Islam, at the same time its core economic indicators have worsened. That is not a certainty about 2036. It is a documented direction of travel as of mid-2026.
Sourcing Note
The "Documented Anchors" section draws on IMF, World Bank, ADB, EUAA, UNHCR, GED, and BBS data, plus named academic and think-tank sources (CAPSS, Counter Extremism Project) and major-outlet reporting (The Diplomat). Where a source has a clear partisan interest (albd.org), that interest is named explicitly rather than hidden. The "Where This Goes" section is explicitly the Center's own analytical judgment, not a sourced fact, and no specific numeric forecast (headcounts, dollar costs, GDP projections) from any of this piece's source material is adopted as an established figure — those were excluded as speculative arithmetic, consistent with this series' standing practice.
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