Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s First Female Prime Minister, Dies

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

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, of which Ms. 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.

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

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

Ms. Zia was freed from house arrest and nearly a dozen of the court cases against her were dropped after Ms. Hasina was toppled and fled the country. But she remained bedridden. Despite her hospitalization, her party still nominated her to contest three seats in the next election, scheduled for February.

From her hospital bed, Ms. Zia celebrated Ms. 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 at 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. He was 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.

Ms. Zia officially entered politics soon after, joining the B.N.P. and quickly rising to take the party’s helm. But Bangladesh again went under military dictatorship, as the army chief Gen. Hussain Muhammad Ershad deposed the interim president who was completing General Zia’s term, and declared himself the country’s leader in 1983.

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

Ms. Zia boycotted elections under martial law in 1986 and was frequently placed under house arrest. Such was the intensity of the campaign that street battles pitting her followers against the police were not uncommon.

General Ershad was forced to resign in 1990, and Ms. Zia was subsequently elected Bangladesh’s first female prime minister in 1991, the first of her three terms in office.

Her supporters recalled the first five-year term as a time of striking advancement in primary education, particularly for girls, and of far-reaching economic changes, notably from support of its clothing-export industry, which helped lift the nation out of absolute poverty.

That helped Bangladesh shed the stigma — attached by Western countries, including the United States — of being an economic basket case. But Ms. Zia prided herself particularly on having enhanced the role of women in a majority-Muslim society.

“We allow and encourage women to participate in all fields of national life,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1993. “We are a religious people, certainly, but we are not extremists or fanatics, and therefore we are more liberal, and we consider that our women are more free.”

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 Ms. Zia lost to Ms. Hasina’s party, giving her rival her first term as the country’s leader.

Ms. 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 Ms. 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. Ms. Hasina was also jailed around the same time. Both leaders were released just before the parliamentary elections, which Ms. Hasina won to become prime minister, entrenching her in power for the next 15 years.

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

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

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

Driven by the loss of her family — which she mentioned in almost every public speech — Ms. Hasina held General Zia and his supporters, to some degree, responsible for conspiring against her father. Ms. Zia’s trouble deepened in 2009 when she was evicted from a government house that her family had lived in for over three decades. Many saw it as an act of revenge by Ms. Hasina, who was evicted from her government-allotted house during Ms. Zia’s tenure in 2001.

As Ms. Hasina tightened her grip on power, the corruption cases against Ms. Zia piled up into the dozens. In 2018, Ms. 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.

By 2023, Bangladesh’s multiparty democracy was being methodically strangled in crowded courtrooms, where B.N.P. followers faced a bewildering succession of usually vague charges brought by the authorities.

Among the cases against Ms. Zia was that she had misrepresented her birthday, to turn Aug. 15, a day of mourning for Ms. Hasina marking the massacre of her family, into her day of celebration. When Ms. Zia did not show up to a court hearing over a complaint lodged in 2016 by a supporter of Ms. 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 B.N.P.’s legal wing. “But, in fact, that is her original birthday.”

Ms. Hasina offered “deepest condolences” to Ms. Zia’s family in a post published on Tuesday on a social media account belonging to her political party.

“As the first woman Prime Minister of Bangladesh, and for her role in the struggle to establish democracy, her contributions to the nation were significant and will be remembered,” Ms. Hasina noted.

Ms. Zia is survived by her son Tarique Zia, who had been leading the family’s party from exile in Britain since 2008 but returned to Bangladesh last week. A second son, Arafat Rahman, died of cardiac arrest in 2015.

Related Content