Tarique Rahman
Tarique Rahman leads the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and spent seventeen years in exile before returning to a country transformed. Born in 1967, he is the elder son of Ziaur Rahman, the general and president assassinated in 1981, and of Khaleda Zia, who led the party after him and was prime minister three times. He entered party politics in the 1990s and became senior joint secretary general in 2002, during his mother's second government, in which he held no ministerial office and was widely described as running a parallel centre of power from an office at Hawa Bhaban. He was arrested in March 2007 by the military-backed caretaker administration and held for over a year on corruption charges, during which he alleged he was tortured; he was released on bail in 2008 for medical treatment and went to London, where he has lived since. He was convicted in absentia in 2016 of money laundering and in 2018 sentenced to life over the grenade attack on an Awami League rally in 2004, in trials his party maintains were political and which took place under the government of Sheikh Hasina. Those convictions were overturned or vacated after Hasina's government fell in August 2024, following the student-led uprising in which several hundred people were killed. He became acting chairman of the party in his mother's illness and is its candidate for prime minister at the election due under Muhammad Yunus's interim administration. He returned to Bangladesh in 2025 after seventeen years abroad. His mother remains the party's chairperson, and the dynastic structure of both major parties is unchanged by the uprising that removed the government. Whether the BNP has reformed or merely waited is the question the election will answer.
- Lived: 1965 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bangladeshi
- Roles: Prime Minister of Bangladesh (2026-present)
