Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s First Woman Prime Minister, Dies at 80
Khaleda Zia, who rose from grieving widow to Bangladesh’s first female premier, has died at 80, leaving behind a legacy of economic reform and political strife.
From Prison to Power: The Making of a Matriarch
Dhaka—In the humid predawn darkness of May 28, 1981, a military transport touched down at Kurmitola airbase carrying the lifeless body of General Ziaur Rahman. His widow, Khaleda Zia, then 36 and a mother of two, stepped onto the tarmac in a white sari and fainted. Few present that night imagined the grieving housewife would, within seven years, storm Bangladesh’s male-dominated citadel to become its first—and so far only—female prime minister.
The Reluctant Heir
Until that moment, Khaleda had shown little appetite for politics. Educated partly at a missionary school and married at 15, she preferred poetry and embroidery to policy papers. Yet the vacuum left by her husband’s assassination was swiftly filled by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which saw in her the last credible link to the slain president. In March 1984, party elders arrived at her cantonment home bearing a single sheet of paper nominating her chairperson. She signed it, they say, with trembling hands.
The Rise and Rule
Her first electoral test came in 1986. Campaigning from a makeshift stage fashioned out of an old truck, she crisscrossed flood-hit districts in a cotton sari, promising rice at 10 taka a kilo. The BNP lost that ballot—widely viewed as rigged—but Khaleda had found her voice: soft, clipped, yet capable of hushing rowdy crowds. Two years later, amid mass uprisings against military ruler Hossain Mohammad Ershad, she led a 72-hour sit-in outside the national press club, surviving on tea and dry bread. The image of her asleep on a jute mat became front-page news, turning the “begum in mourning” into a symbol of defiance.
“She was shy, almost timid, in private. But put her in front of a microphone and she became steel,” recalls journalist Mahfuz Ullah, who covered her 1991 campaign.
1991: A Historic Mandate
When Bangladesh finally returned to parliamentary democracy, Khaleda’s BNP won 140 of 300 seats. On March 20, 1991, she walked into the Prime Minister’s Office wearing a beige silk sari and a hesitant smile. Diplomats noted she asked aides to remove the larger-than-life portrait of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—father of archrival Sheikh Hasina—because “this is the people’s office, not a museum.”
Triumphs and Tumult
Her first term is remembered for liberalizing the economy, privatizing state-run jute mills, and launching the country’s first cellular network. Yet critics accuse her of turning a blind eye to rising Islamist militancy, including a 1994 grenade attack on a secular cultural event that killed five. Meanwhile, a bitter personal feud with Sheikh Hasina paralyzed parliament; the two women reportedly passed each other in the hallway without a word, earning Bangladesh the moniker “the republic of bruised egos.”
The Comeback That Wasn’t
After a decade in opposition and two stints in jail on corruption charges she dismissed as “politically scripted,” Khaleda roared back in 2001 with a two-thirds majority. This time she projected a softer image, promising to turn Dhaka into a “city of gardens.” Instead, her second term was scarred by nationwide strikes, the 2004 grenade attack on an Awami League rally that killed 24, and a creeping energy crisis that left rural Bangladesh in the dark for up to ten hours a day. In 2006, she resigned amid mass protests and a military-backed caretaker government that would later jail her on charges of embezzling €250,000 intended for an orphanage trust.
Final Years
Barred from contesting the 2018 polls while her party boycotted, Khaleda watched from a hospital bed as Sheikh Hasina won a third straight term. A rare public appearance in 2022—frail, in a wheelchair—sparked speculation of a comeback, but recurring heart and kidney complications intervened. She spent her last months at a plush Dhaka cantonment residence, allowed out on humanitarian grounds, reading thrillers in English and dictating occasional letters to loyalists. On October 28, 2024, she was rushed to Evercare Hospital with breathing difficulties and died at 2:15 a.m., aged 80.
Legacy in a Divided Republic
Her death leaves the BNP at a crossroads: without its towering matriarch or a clear successor, the party faces an existential crisis ahead of national elections due by January 2026. Supporters hail her as the “mother of parliamentary democracy,” while detractors blame her for institutionalizing zero-sum politics. Yet even rivals concede she shattered a glass ceiling in a conservative Muslim society, proving that a widow in a sari could command armies of men.
“She was our Iron Lady, but her armor was always the cotton sari of a Bengali homemaker,” says BNP acting chairman Tarique Rahman, her elder son, voice cracking over the phone from London.
As Dhaka’s streets filled with mourners chanting “Khaleda Zia Amar Rai” (“Khaleda Zia, our leader forever”), the government declared a state funeral and three days of national mourning. Her body, draped in the red-and-green flag, will lie in state at the parliament complex before burial beside her husband at the Chandrima Udyan monument—closing the circle that began on a tarmac 43 years ago.