Bangladesh’s First Female Prime Minister Khaleda Zia Dies at 80

From Prison Barracks to Prime Minister’s Residence: The Life and Death of Khaleda Zia

She arrived in Dhaka on a rain-lashed August afternoon in 1975, a 29-year-old widow clutching the blood-stained sari her husband had worn the day he was assassinated. Forty-nine years later, the same city awoke to the news that Khaleda Zia—three-time prime minister, two-time prisoner, and the woman who changed Bangladeshi politics forever—had breathed her last at the capital’s Evercare Hospital. She was 80.

The Final Hours

Doctors say her heart, already weakened by years of diabetes and arthritis, simply stopped at 3:12 a.m. local time. Family members, allowed to crowd the corridor after weeks of restricted visits, broke into sobs that echoed down the sterile hallway. "Amma is gone," whispered her youngest son, Tarique Rahman, on a phone call that would ricochet across the diaspora within minutes.

The Rise

No one expected the quiet literature student from Dinajpur to become the nucleus of a movement. Yet when army officers placed her under house arrest in 1982, students at Dhaka University began chanting “Khaleda Zia Zindabad” in defiance of General Ershad’s martial law. By 1991 she had traded her black burqa for a crisp white saree, becoming the first woman to govern a Muslim-majority nation through the ballot box.

“She spoke the language of the bazaar, not the constitution,” recalls political scientist Tasneem Siddiqui. “That’s why the rickshaw-puller in Chittagong trusted her more than the Oxford-educated technocrats.”

The Fall—And The Comeback

Corruption allegations, a care-taker government, and finally the 2007 military-backed emergency dragged her from the Prime Minister’s Office to a makeshift jail cell inside a colonial-era parliament annex. Visitors remember she still asked after the price of rice and whether the monsoon had arrived on time. Released in 2008, she roared back with a landslide victory, only to be toppled again in 2014 amid walk-over elections boycotted by her party.

The Twilight Years

Since 2018 she lived in a gilded cage: a 19th-century mansion converted into a “sub-jail,” her movements tracked by CCTV, her phone calls monitored. Neighbors would see her occasionally on the roof, feeding crows leftover paratha. Even then, letters bearing her signature—smuggled out by sympathetic guards—could still trigger street protests within hours.

What Happens Next

• The government has announced a three-day state mourning; flags will fly at half-mast on all public buildings.
• Her party, the BNP, demands a state funeral at the parliament plaza, a request the interim administration has yet to approve.
• Security analysts warn that her death could re-ignite the street politics that have paralyzed the nation since last summer’s quota-reform uprising.

Global Reactions

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called her “a towering figure who shaped the arc of South Asian democracy.” Pakistan’s foreign office praised her “commitment to regional peace,” while the U.S. State Department urged “calm and restraint during this sensitive moment.”

A Complicated Legacy

To supporters, she remains “Maa”, the woman who built 12,000 community clinics and opened the telecom sector to private investment. Critics point to the 2004 grenade attack on an opposition rally that killed 24, and the $1 billion Padma bridge graft case that never reached trial. Numbers, however, do not capture the emotional shorthand she inspired: in rural bazaars her photo still hangs next to the Prophet’s mantle, a secular saint in a deeply religious land.

As Dhaka’s night sky turned violet with the last maghrib prayer on the day she died, old men in tea stalls argued over who would carry her body to the grave. Some wanted the martyrs’ cemetery; others preferred beside her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, at the parliament complex. The debate itself is a testament: Khaleda Zia may have left the stage, but the story she scripted for Bangladesh is far from over.