TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Khaleda Zia, who served as prime minister of Bangladesh for three terms, died on Tuesday morning at the age of 80.
Zia and her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) were once hailed for playing a crucial role in transitioning the South Asian nation from military rule to democracy.
She served as prime minister of Bangladesh between 1991 and 1996, and between 2001 and 2006. She was the first woman to serve as prime minister of Bangladesh.
Zia had been sentenced to several years behind bars prior her death for alleged involvement in corruption charges that her party said were politically motivated.
Rise to politics
Zia entered politics after her husband, former president Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated in May 1981 during a military coup. Rahman had fought for Bangladesh's independence war from Pakistan in 1971, and formed the BNP party a few years prior his assassination.
Zia, who was a housewife at the time with no experience in politics, soon became one of the country's top leaders for her civilian political resistance against the then-military regime.
Zia established a solid political alliance by including political parties from both the left and the right with her center-right party. She successfully forced the military regime to give up power by leading nationwide movements for democracy.
On February 27,1991, Zia's party won 140 of the 300 directly-elected seats during the national election and became the country's first woman prime minister.
Empowering women
Zia helped increase literacy rates among girls and boosted job opportunities for women by providing free education and scholarships. She introduced daily free meals for students at schools across the country with help from foreign donors. During her tenures, those efforts have seen millions of girls enrolled in primary and secondary schools.
Zia also contributed to expanding the country's export-oriented garment industry.
"Now as Prime Minister, Mrs. Zia, in contrast with Benazir Bhutto when she first became Prime Minister of Pakistan, is aggressively promoting education and vocational training, especially of girls, and expanding small-scale, no-collateral lending to increase the self-sufficiency of women," journalist Barbara Crossette wrote in the New York Times in November 1993.
US Forbes magazine, which included Zia as one of the 100 world's most powerful women for several years during her leadership between 2001 and 2006, wrote, "Once a shy and withdrawn housewife, Zia has revitalized the education sector, particularly for young girls."
Laila Noor Islam, a professor at Dhaka University, told DW Zia will be remembered for changing the social and political landscape of Bangladesh.
"People will remember her for introducing the parliamentary system of democracy in her country, for creating export-oriented readymade garment factories where hundreds of thousands of women got jobs, for introducing free primary education for all, and developing the caretaker government system for conducting free and fair national elections," she said.
Archrival Sheikh Hasina
Soon upon entering politics, Zia became the archrival of Sheikh Hasina, the top leader of the center-left Awami League (AL) party and in power since 2008.
They are often called "the Battling Begums" – "begum" refers to a Muslim woman of high rank – for their longs-standing rivalry, which split the country's political arena into two, one led by Hasina's AL, the other by Zia's BNP.
"When I hear the name Khaleda Zia, what comes to mind is "Hasina's rival." Zia and Hasina have had such a long and bitter rivalry, and it's been amplified by the fact that they've dominated Bangladeshi politics for so long," Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told DW.
"And given that their respective families comprise the country's two political dynasties, the rivalry also is embedded in the core political history of Bangladesh," he added.
Corruption allegations
Zia was convicted in a graft case in February 2018 and later in a separate corruption case. The politician was accused of misusing her power by embezzling some $250,000 (€240,000) in donations meant for an orphanage trust.
The BNP maintains the cases were fabricated to keep Zia out of politics, allegations denied by Hasina's government.
Over the past decade, more than 180,000 legal cases have also been filed against nearly four million BNP members, according to the party's count. The data shows that more than 600 party members have been abducted, and around 3,000 were victims of extrajudicial killings at the hands of authorities during the same period.
In 2020, her prison sentence was converted to house arrest before she was released again in 2024 after the fall of her rival Sheikh Hasina's government.
Political downfall
Zia, an advocate of democracy, slowly lost her ground by failing to form solid political resistance against the Hasina government.
"Khaleda Zia has made a lot of mistakes in the last decade. Boycotting elections led to missed opportunities. More importantly, she opted to play the role of a disruptive and confrontational opposition without seeking a middle ground, and this led to a lot of burned bridges," Kugelman said.
"It also led to her party resorting to violence at times, which didn't help its cause. Additionally, her decision to align herself with Islamist political parties [at times], especially those with hardline elements cost her and her party support from those that uphold the idea of a secular and moderate Bangladesh," he added.
Asif Nazrul, a professor at Dhaka University, believes Zia's downfall should also be attributed to her unwillingness to gain the confidence of India and foreign diplomats who could have pushed Hasina to conduct a fair and inclusive national election.
"Zia's decision not to meet Indian President Pranab Mukherjee in Dhaka in 2013, and refusing the offer of Sheikh Hasina regarding election-time government in the same year, have heavily cost her political career," Nazrul told DW.
"She has failed to win the heart of Dhaka-based elite intellectuals and western diplomats," he added. "Her failure to stop the people in BNP and its allies in harboring separatists fighting the Indian government in the past also made her weaker over time."
But Zia's fight for democracy will be remembered for years to come, said Nazrul.
"Zia could have flown to other countries during political uncertainties in 2006 and 2007, and during her trial in the last years,” Nazrul said. "She was aged and very ill, and despite knowing the likelihood of her suffering, she did not bow to the Hasina government and took any chance of leaving the country."
