Khaleda Zia

Khaleda Zia became the first woman prime minister of Bangladesh and spent thirty years alternating in power and in prison with the other woman who dominated its politics. She was a housewife with no political involvement until her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated in 1981; she was drawn into the Bangladesh Nationalist Party he had founded and became its leader in 1984. She led the street movement that forced the military ruler Hussain Muhammad Ershad out in 1990, in uneasy alliance with Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, and won the 1991 election. The rivalry between the two women - one the widow of a president, the other the daughter of the country's founder - has structured Bangladeshi politics ever since, with each boycotting elections the other held. She was prime minister again from 2001 to 2006. After 2008 she faced corruption prosecutions her party called political; she was convicted in 2018 over a charitable trust and imprisoned, released to house arrest during the pandemic, and freed after Hasina's government fell in 2024. Her son Tarique Rahman led the party from exile in London through much of that period. She was born in Dinajpur and married Ziaur Rahman at fifteen, before he was known. Her party governed in coalition with Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders had opposed independence in 1971, and that alliance is the charge her opponents have used against her ever since. A grenade attack on an Awami League rally in Dhaka in 2004 killed twenty-four people during her second term, and the investigation was later found to have been obstructed. In 2010 she was evicted from the house in the Dhaka cantonment she had lived in since her husband's death. She has been in poor health throughout the years since her conviction.

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