The flag bearer of democracy in Bangladesh

Khaleda Zia has left behind a nation that she helped shape-first as a reluctant icon of democracy, and later as an enduring leader in a fiercely contested political sphere. It was only after the assassination of her husband in 1981 — with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leaderless and fractured — that she stepped into the void.

What emerged from her personal tragedy, her husband’s death, was a leader of startling resolve. On the streets of Dhaka in the 1980s, Khaleda became the “uncompromising leader,” a moniker earned by her refusal to negotiate with the military regime. It culminated in the 1991 general election, where she led the BNP to a stunning victory, becoming Bangladesh’s first woman prime minister.

Khaleda made one of her most significant political compromises by joining forces with her arch rival, Sheikh Hasina, in 1990. She agreed to a strategic liaison to oust Ershad. Khaleda presided over the transition from presidential to parliamentary government, a structural change intended to anchor democracy.

Khaleda’s administration in 1996 navigated a volatile political impasse to institutionalise a fair transfer of power. She passed the 13th amendment to the constitution which formally embedded the caretaker government system into law. Then she promptly dissolved the parliament and resigned, only to run for re-election under the very neutral authority she had just empowered. That election brought the Awami League, not the BNP, to power. Still, Khaleda won all the seats she contested. Khaleda, a three-time prime minister, remains the only political leader in the country’s history to have won every parliamentary seat she contested.

Her administration’s most enduring structural legacy was its pivot toward economic liberalisation and social equity. Guided by her finance minister, M Saifur Rahman, Khaleda introduced the value-added tax (VAT) in 1991, a difficult reform that permanently expanded the state’s revenue base.

Recognising that development was impossible without women, her government launched a nationwide stipend programme in 1994 that made secondary education free for girls in rural areas.

In 2001, Khaleda orchestrated a stunning political comeback, this triumph was a rejection of the incumbent Awami League as well as a validation of her controversial strategic pivot — an electoral coalition with conservative Islamist parties.

Her legacy is not without deep fissures. Her career was defined by a bitter, decades-long duel with Hasina and the Awami League, a rivalry that often paralysed the state. Her last tenure was punctuated by the intervention of an army-backed government in 2007 that saw both of them jailed.

By late 2006, the country’s democratic machinery had ground to a violent halt. As Khaleda’s third term ended, a deadlock over who would head the interim caretaker government spilt onto the streets, turning Dhaka into a battleground.

In January 2015, Khaleda found herself in a siege-like state, her Gulshan office barricaded by police trucks loaded with sand. It was during this enforced isolation that she received the devastating news of the death of her younger son, Arafat Rahman Koko, in Malaysia. Her personal tragedy was compounded by the politics of the moment.

The trajectory of Khaleda’s final decade was tragic, yet ended with a twist of historical irony. In 2018, she was sentenced to prison on corruption charges involving the Zia Orphanage Trust-charges many decried as a politically motivated tool to keep her away from elections.

For over two years, beginning in February 2018, Khaleda was the sole inmate of the abandoned Old Dhaka Central Jail. Cut off from the outside world and battling cascading health issues, she spent 760 days in this emptiness.

In those years, it seemed her story would end in a prison cell, her voice absent from parliament since 2014. Even after a conditional release in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she remained confined to her home in Gulshan, a shadow of the figure who once commanded millions.

But the wheel turned one last time. Following the massive student-led uprising in 2024 that toppled Hasina’s regime, Khaleda saw her political image resurrected. She was completely freed in August 2024 after Muhammad Yunus took over as the country’s interim leader. She witnessed the fall of the government that had jailed her.

In the days following the dramatic collapse of the Awami League government in 2024, Khaleda’s most defining political act was perhaps her silence. She refrained from issuing a single public statement of personal gloating or vindictiveness against the woman who had jailed her. Even in her first public address after six years of silence-delivered via video link from a hospital bed-she notably avoided mentioning her rival’s name in anger. Instead, she urged the nation to reject the "politics of vengeance" and destruction.

Khaleda’s health had been in steep decline for years. By the time she was last admitted to Evercare on November 23, 2025, with heart and lung infections, she was already navigating life with a pacemaker and the scars of previous stenting procedures.

Khaleda’s eldest son, Tarique Rahman, remains the undisputed heir apparent to her political dynasty, serving as the acting chairman of the BNP from London, where he was in exile since 2008. The fall of the Hasina regime in August 2024 led to his acquittal in multiple high-profile cases and he returned home.

While the interim government signalled a willingness to facilitate his homecoming, Tarique’s delay, attributed to lingering security concerns and strategic timing for the upcoming elections, created a poignant backdrop to his mother’s final battles.

Khaleda may have lost her health to the struggle, but she died having secured her indelible place in history.

Courtesy: The Daily Star, Bangladesh