The diplomatic communiqué says "strategic partnership." The arms import ledger says what the relationship actually is. In South Asia, three of the world's largest arms importers — India, Pakistan, and historically China — operate within one geopolitical theatre. The SIPRI data for 2020–2025 is now complete. It tells a story of accelerating divergence, a China-Pakistan axis deepening in both volume and technology, an India slowly pivoting West while maintaining a Russian legacy fleet, and a May 2025 conflict that served as the most expensive arms demonstration in modern Asian history.
T1 India was the world's second-largest arms importer in 2020–24 with an 8.3 percent share of global imports, displaced from first place only by Ukraine's wartime surge (nearly a hundredfold increase). India's total imports declined 9.3 percent between 2015–19 and 2020–24, partly attributable to the government's Aatmanirbhar Bharat push — record domestic defence production of ₹1.27 lakh crore in 2023–24, a 174 percent rise since 2014–15. The decline in imports is real. It does not yet represent strategic independence.
| Supplier | India's share 2020–24 | Trend vs 2015–19 | Key systems |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | ↓ from 55% (was 72% in 2010–14) | S-400, Su-30MKI, MiG-29, T-90 tanks | |
| France | ↑ strong growth | Rafale jets (36 delivered), Scorpène submarines (6), Rafale-M (26 ordered) | |
| Israel | Steady | Heron drones, Barak air defence, Harop loitering munitions, SPICE bombs | |
| USA | ↑ growing, not yet top 3 | P-8I Poseidon, C-17 Globemaster, AH-64 Apache, MQ-9B Predator drones |
The trajectory of India's diversification is confirmed in its new and planned orders. Contracts with France include up to 140 additional combat aircraft and 3 more submarines. Germany is in advanced discussions for 6 submarines. The GE F414 jet engine deal for the Tejas Mk2 — proposed as a joint production arrangement in India — would represent the deepest technology transfer the US has offered any non-NATO partner.
T1 Russia's share of Indian arms imports has dropped from 72 percent in 2010–14 to 36 percent in 2020–24. The shift is visible not just in completed deliveries but in the order book: most of India's new and planned contracts are with Western suppliers. The FY 2025–26 defence budget of ₹6.81 lakh crore ($77.8 billion) allocates 75 percent of capital procurement to domestic manufacturers. India's defence budget has grown 42 percent since 2015 — but at 1.9 percent of GDP, analysts at Forecast International, the Delhi Policy Group, and Breaking Defense all note that it is insufficient to close the modernisation gap, particularly given the two-front threat from China and Pakistan that Indian defence planners now formally acknowledge.
72 percent of India's total defence budget goes to salaries, pensions, maintenance, repairs, and infrastructure — before a single rupee purchases new equipment. Defence pensions alone increased 14 percent in FY2025–26 to ₹1.6 lakh crore ($18.6 billion). India is the world's fifth-largest military spender in absolute terms and a structurally under-capitalised defence state by percentage-of-GDP and by capital-to-revenue ratio.
T1 China supplied 80–81 percent of Pakistan's arms imports in 2020–24, up from 74 percent in 2015–19 and 73 percent in the period before that. The concentration is extraordinary: although China exported major arms to 47 countries in the period, 61 percent of all Chinese arms exports went to one state — Pakistan. This is not a supplier-importer relationship. It is a structural dependency approaching the level of a single-source arrangement. Pakistan's arms imports rose 61–66 percent between the two five-year periods, funded partly by Chinese state financing that circumvents Pakistan's IMF-constrained civilian budget.
Pakistan's major Chinese acquisitions in the period include J-10C fighter jets (20 delivered, 156 JF-17s in service), PL-15 air-to-air missiles, HQ-9 and HQ-16/LY-80 air defence systems, Agosta-90B submarine upgrades, and Type 054A/P frigates. Turkey contributed Bayraktar TB2 drones. Sweden and Italy supplied minor systems. Over 90 percent of Pakistan's military equipment is imported; domestic defence production covers 10–15 percent of needs and depends heavily on Chinese technology transfer in the JF-17 co-production programme.
T1 Operation Sindoor, fought May 7–10, 2025, was the first known combat use of the J-10C fighter jet and PL-15 air-to-air missile. US officials confirmed to Reuters that Pakistani J-10Cs fired air-to-air missiles at Indian warplanes, shooting down at least two aircraft. Pakistan's Foreign Minister claimed five Indian jets downed, including three Rafales. India's Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan acknowledged some losses but rejected the five-aircraft figure. The Indian Air Force Chief confirmed India destroyed five Pakistani jets and a major surveillance aircraft.
What is uncontested from multiple independent sources: India successfully destroyed China-made HQ-9 and LY-80 air defence systems in Lahore and Karachi using a Harop loitering munition and a missile strike respectively. The HQ-9 is China's S-300 equivalent — its failure to intercept Indian strikes on protected military installations was observed and documented. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's November 2025 report specifically noted China exploited the conflict to test advanced hardware and wage an information campaign to boost J-35 fighter sales, including an attempt to persuade Indonesia to halt Rafale purchases.
The J-10C achieved the first confirmed beyond-visual-range kill using a Chinese-designed missile. The HQ-9 air defence system failed to intercept Indian strikes on installations it was specifically protecting. Both results matter for the global arms market. China can now market combat-proven air-to-air capability. But Chinese integrated air defence — the system clients buy to protect themselves — failed its most visible test. Post-Sindoor, China offered Pakistan 40 J-35 fifth-generation fighters, KJ-500 early warning aircraft, and ballistic missile defence upgrades. Pakistan's June 2025 defence budget increased 20 percent to approximately $9 billion even as the overall budget shrank.
The arms supply map of South Asia reveals four structural truths that diplomatic language obscures.
First: The China-Pakistan military relationship is not an alliance of convenience — it is a supply-chain dependency approaching single-source status. When Pakistan's Chinese-origin systems performed mixed results in Sindoor, the response was not to diversify — it was to order more advanced Chinese systems. The relationship runs too deep to unwind. China is not just Pakistan's supplier; it is the architect of Pakistan's defence industrial base.
Second: India's diversification away from Russia is real but structurally incomplete. The S-400, the Su-30MKI fleet, the T-90 tanks — these are legacy dependencies that will take a decade or more to replace. India now buys Western and will increasingly fight with Western systems. But it maintains and operates a primarily Russian fleet. The two-supply-chain reality creates integration challenges and maintenance vulnerabilities that India's procurement planning does not fully resolve.
Third: The US has a growing stake in India's security architecture but is not yet India's primary supplier. The Predator drone deal, the F414 engine discussions, the INDUS-X technology framework — these represent a US-India defence relationship accelerating in the right direction for Washington. But India does not figure among the top three importers of US arms. The relationship is strategic but not yet transactional at the scale the rhetoric implies.
Fourth: Sindoor changed the Chinese arms market calculus in ways that will take two to three years to show up in SIPRI data. The J-10C's successful use gives China a combat-proven marketing claim it previously lacked. But the failure of Chinese air defence systems — the high-value, high-margin product China most needs to sell — creates a credibility gap in the integrated air defence market. These two results pull in opposite directions. The net effect on China's arms export ambitions is genuinely unclear.
The arms import map of South Asia is the most honest document in the region's geopolitics. It shows what states actually trust, what vulnerabilities they are willing to live with, and how they intend to fight.
What it shows in 2026: India is spending at scale but not at the pace required, diversifying in the right direction but from a deeply Russian starting point, and building domestic capacity that is impressive in trajectory but years from strategic independence. Pakistan is economically broken but militarily supplied, dependent on a single patron at a depth that removes strategic optionality, and buying more expensive systems from China even as those systems produced mixed results in their first live test.
China is using Pakistan as both a client and a laboratory — 61 percent of its arms exports serve a single strategic purpose: keeping India's western flank permanently armed, permanently hostile, and permanently costly. The arms bazaar is not a market. It is a geopolitical architecture. And in South Asia, the architect is Beijing.