Hussain Muhammad Ershad
Hussain Muhammad Ershad ruled Bangladesh from March 1982, when as army chief he removed the elected president Sattar in a bloodless coup and said the country needed a rest from politics, to December 1990, when the students and the two women who led the parties, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, brought the cities to a halt and the army told him it would not shoot. In eight years he made himself president in 1983. He founded the Jatiya Party in 1986 to give the regime a civilian face, and won elections in 1986 and 1988 that the opposition boycotted. He made Islam the state religion by the eighth amendment of 1988. He built the upazila system of sub-district councils that decentralised the administration and the patronage. The years also had the floods of 1987 and 1988, in which two-thirds of the country went under water. There was the Jamuna bridge begun, the family-planning programme that halved the birth rate, and the privatisation of the jute mills. There was a corruption that the country took as a given until the courts convicted him of it. He was born in Rangpur in 1930 into a Bengali family from Cooch Behar, studied at Dhaka University, was commissioned in the Pakistan army in 1952, spent the war of 1971 as a prisoner in West Pakistan, which the freedom fighters never forgave. He was repatriated in 1973 and made chief of the army by Ziaur Rahman in 1978, three years before Zia's assassination. In the fall of December 1990 he resigned to the chief justice and was arrested. It was followed by convictions for corruption, illegal arms possession and the Janata Tower land case, and by six years in jail, during which he won five seats in the election of 1991 from his cell. He was freed in 1997. He spent the next twenty years as the kingmaker between the two women, joining Khaleda's alliance in 2001 and Hasina's in 2008, whose government gave him the post of special envoy and kept his party as the opposition it could control. He withdrew from the election of 2014 and was taken to a military hospital. He contested it anyway. He died in Dhaka in July 2019 at eighty-nine, the leader of the opposition in parliament, still, and was buried in Rangpur.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Bangladeshi
- Roles: president, general, dictator
