Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, dies aged 80

By Saif Hasnat and Mujib Mashal

DHAKA — Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, whose decades-long rivalry with another woman at the helm of a duelling political dynasty shaped the fate of the young South Asian nation, died Tuesday (30) at a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. She was believed to be 80.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), of which Zia was the chairperson, announced her death in a statement on its official social media page. The statement did not mention a cause of death.

Zia, the widow of the first of several military rulers in Bangladesh’s turbulent 50-year history as an independent nation, served two full terms and one shortened term as prime minister. For much of the past three decades, she alternated as Bangladesh’s highest elected official with Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of the country’s slain founding president, who grew increasingly authoritarian until she was toppled following deadly protests last year.

In her final decade of life, the ailing Zia was hounded by her political rival, who kept her either in jail or under house arrest as court cases piled up against her. She was frequently taken in and out of the hospital under security protection, suffering from a number of age-related illnesses along with rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and advanced liver problems.

When her condition worsened after she caught COVID in 2021, doctors advised her to go abroad for treatment. But the courts under Hasina denied several requests by her lawyers. Bangladesh’s foreign minister at the time, A.K. Abdul Momen, said that Zia could bring any doctor she wanted to Bangladesh to treat her, but she wouldn’t be allowed to go abroad.

Zia was freed from house arrest, and nearly a dozen of the court cases against her were dropped after Hasina was toppled from power and forced to flee the country. But she remained bedridden. Despite her hospitalization, her political outfit, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, had still nominated her to contest three seats in the next election, which is scheduled to take place in February 2026.

From her hospital bed, Zia celebrated Hasina’s downfall as “the end of tyranny”.

“Through a long movement of struggle and sacrifice, we have freed ourselves from the fascist, illegal government,” she read from a statement, short of breath, in what ended up being her last public words.

Born Khaleda Khanam Putul in 1945 or 1946 in the Dinajpur District of what was then the Bengal Presidency of undivided India under British imperial control, she was the third of five siblings. The exact date of her birth has been a subject of controversy in Bangladeshi politics. Her father, Iskandar Majumder, was a tea trader, and her mother, Taiyaba Majumder, a housewife. She attended high school in Dinajpur, according to her party’s publications, though the exact degree of her higher education remains unclear.

Much of her life would be shaped by two partitions of the subcontinent. When Pakistan was cleaved off India as an independent nation in 1947, her family moved to Pakistan while she was still a toddler. In 1971, East Pakistan would split off as the independent nation of Bangladesh, after years of a bloody campaign of cultural suppression against the ethnic Bengalis by Pakistan’s army.

In the 1960s, she married Ziaur Rahman, an officer of Pakistan’s army who later became a key figure in the Bangladesh independence movement and eventually the leader of the new nation’s military, known as General Zia.

Bangladesh plunged into violent chaos in 1975, which set off a pattern of bloody coups and counter coups, when its founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated by a group of army officers in a late-night massacre at his home that wiped out much of his family. One of his two surviving daughters, Sheikh Hasina, would take up his political legacy, bearing a grudge that would shape much of her politics.

General Zia, who was the deputy chief of the army at the time of the assassination, rose as the military’s top leader and laid claim to the government following two chaotic years of deadly intrigue. But the general, who had replaced his army fatigues with tailored suits and tried to legitimize his power by leading his newly formed Bangladesh Nationalist Party to an election victory, was felled in another coup. He and half a dozen of his bodyguards were assassinated in 1981 by a group of army officers while he was visiting the southeastern city of Chittagong.

Khaleda Zia officially entered politics soon after, joining the BNP and quickly rising to take the party’s helm. But Bangladesh again went under military dictatorship, as army chief Gen. Hussain Muhammad Ershad deposed the interim president who was completing General Zia’s term, and declared himself the country’s leader.

It was the fight against Ershad’s dictatorship that briefly brought the country’s two prominent rival women to the same side, organizing a large movement for restoring democracy.

Khaleda Zia was subsequently elected Bangladesh’s first female prime minister in 1991, the first of her three terms in office. Her second term was cut short, as the opposition boycotted the election and parliament agreed to a revote under a neutral caretaker government — an election that Zia lost to Hasina’s party, giving her rival her first term as the country’s leader.

Zia returned to power in 2001, elected in coalition with several Islamist parties. But she became increasingly bogged down by allegations that Islamist militancy was on the rise under the coalition, and that many close to her — including her sons — were mired in corruption cases, plights that Hasina rallied around to regain power.

Her downfall began at the end of her third term, as the military-backed caretaker government overseeing the elections arrested her on corruption charges. Hasina was also jailed around the same time. Both leaders were released just before the parliamentary elections, which Hasina won to become prime minister, entrenching her power for the next 15 years.

By some accounts, Hasina and Zia were held in detention in houses not far from each other, and Hasina shared her food with Zia.

But Hasina, in an interview with The New York Times in her final year in office, denied that. She said Zia was under house arrest in a “newly built house”.

“A better place, and better furniture and everything,” Hasina said. “For me, it was all old, broken.”

Driven by the loss of her family — which she mentioned in almost every public speech until she was ousted from office — Hasina held General Zia and his supporters, to some degree, responsible for conspiring against her father. Khaleda Zia’s trouble deepened in 2009 when she was evicted from a government house that her family had lived in for over three decades, since her husband had been the military’s No. 2 leader. Many saw it as an act of revenge by Hasina, who was evicted from her government-allocated house during Zia’s tenure in 2001.

As Hasina tightened her grip on power, the corruption cases against Zia piled up into the dozens. In 2018, Zia was sent to jail for five years on charges of embezzling from the state’s orphanage funds, and the sentence was later increased to 10 years.

Among the cases against Zia was that she had misrepresented her birthday, to turn Aug. 15, a day of mourning for Hasina, to mark the massacre of her family, into her day of celebration. When Zia did not show up to a court hearing over a complaint lodged in 2016 by a supporter of Hasina’s party, the court issued an arrest warrant for her.

“The complaint was that she had been celebrating a fake birthday, on Aug. 15, for a long time,” said Syed Nazrul Islam, a lawyer from the BNP’s legal wing. “But, in fact, that is her original birthday.”

Khaleda Zia is survived by her son Tarique Zia, who has been leading the family’s party from exile in the United Kingdom since 2008. A second son, Arafat Rahman, died of cardiac arrest in 2015.

-New York Times