In early December, 48-year-old Tipu Sultan, a grassroots activist of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), stood outside Dhaka’s Evercare Hospital holding a placard that read, “I want to donate my kidney to Begum Khaleda Zia”.
A video of Sultan and the placard went viral in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people that has been on edge since Khaleda, the BNP chairperson and former prime minister, was admitted to hospital on November 23. Tipu has since spent his days on the pavement opposite the hospital gate, promising to stay put until he receives news of her recovery.
“She is like my mother. She sacrificed everything for democracy,” he told Al Jazeera. “My only prayer is that God allows her to see the upcoming election,” he added, referring to the national elections scheduled for February 12.
But it was not to be. Early in the morning, on December 30, the 79-year-old Khaleda passed away in hospital, her party announced.
“Our beloved national leader is no longer with us. She left us at 6am today,” the BNP said in the statement posted on Facebook.
With her archrival and fellow former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, now in exile in India, Khaleda’s death closes a more than three-decade-long chapter when the two leaders – who came to be known as the ‘battling begums’, an honorific traditionally reserved for Muslim women of authority – dominated Bangladeshi politics.
But as with Hasina, Khaleda’s legacy is grey: Both women fought for democracy, against authoritarianism. While Khaleda, unlike Hasina, was never accused of carrying out mass atrocities against critics, she was also a polarising figure. Her uncompromising style while in opposition – leading election boycotts and prolonged street movements – combined with recurring allegations of corruption while she was in power, inspired intense loyalty among supporters and equal distrust among her critics.
The rise
Begum Khaleda Zia was born on August 15, 1946, in Dinajpur – then part of British India’s East Bengal, now northern Bangladesh.
Her father, Iskandar Majumder, originally from Feni in the country’s southeast, had previously run a tea business in Jalpaiguri (in present-day India) before relocating with his family to East Bengal, which would soon become East Pakistan after the 1947 partition of India.
Khaleda spent her early years in Dinajpur, where she studied at the Dinajpur Government Girls’ High School before enrolling at Surendranath College.
Her entry into politics was shaped not by early ambition but by upheaval.
The assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, in an abortive military mutiny in Chattogram on May 30, 1981, plunged Bangladesh into deep uncertainty. Rahman – who had stabilised the country after years of coups and counter-coups – left behind a fragile political order and a governing party, the BNP, that was suddenly without its founder.
Although Khaleda had not been politically active during her husband’s presidency, senior BNP leaders saw her as the only figure who could unify the party’s competing factions and preserve Rahman’s legacy.
After Rahman’s death, Vice President Abdus Sattar became acting president and later won an election. But within months, army chief Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power in a bloodless coup in March 1982, imposing martial law. It was in this volatile context – with the military back in control and political parties fighting for survival – that Khaleda began her ascent, eventually emerging as a central civilian figure challenging hardline rule.
Khaleda joined the BNP as a general member in January 1982, became its vice chair in 1983, and was elected party chairperson in August 1984. In the decades that followed, she would win three elections to become prime minister in a political landscape that she dominated alongside her longtime rival, Sheikh Hasina, and her Awami League party.
Her public life unfolded alongside personal struggles: her elder son, Tarique Rahman, went into exile in 2008 after being arrested during a military-backed caretaker government’s anticorruption drive; her younger son, Arafat Rahman Koko, died of cardiac arrest in 2015 while living abroad. Khaleda herself later spent long periods in prison after her 2018 convictions in corruption cases brought under the Awami League government, followed by years of political isolation and deteriorating health.
Tarique eventually returned to Dhaka on December 25, after the cases against him were dropped by the interim government of Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, who took office after Hasina’s ouster.
“Her [Khaleda’s] entire life was filled with hardship, yet she chose her country over personal comfort,” said Dilara Choudhury, a political scientist who observed both Khaleda and her husband closely. “That is why she is remembered across political lines as one of the most emblematic leaders of her time.”
Private life before politics
People who knew Khaleda before she entered public life describe her as a woman who was reserved, soft-spoken and consistently courteous. She married army officer Rahman in 1960, when she was about 15, long before he emerged as a national figure.
Rahman rose to prominence after Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, later assuming the presidency in 1977 and founding the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in 1978. Zia would later inherit her husband’s politics – centred on nationalism, multi-party democracy and a market-oriented economy.
From 1978 to 1981, she lived with her family in a modest military residence at 6 Moinul Road in Dhaka Cantonment, then designated as the residence of the deputy chief of the army, where then-Captain (later Colonel) Harunur Rashid Khan served as an aide-de-camp to her husband, President Rahman.
“She coordinated the house herself, welcomed guests and managed family matters,” Colonel Khan told Al Jazeera. “I never saw her raise her voice. She was humble, kind and thoughtful.”
He recalled her calm approach to parenting. When her younger son, Arafat, then aged 7, struggled to gain admission to a school, she asked only for other alternative school options. And when the boy later injured himself imitating a television stunt, she expressed no anger towards the staff who were supposed to be minding him.
“That was the kind of person she was,” Khan said. “Graceful, composed and considerate.”
But everything changed on May 30, 1981.
At dawn that day, Khan learned that Rahman had been assassinated in the port city of Chattogram, in an attempted coup by a group of army officers. The coup would eventually be crushed by Ershad, Rahman’s army chief, though Ershad would himself grab power months later.
“For a moment [after learning of the assassination], I felt the ground slip beneath my feet; but I did not share the information with Madam [Begum Zia] for moments,” Khan said.
Fearing that the family residence might be the next target, he immediately ordered an entire company of about 120 soldiers to be ready to defend the family.
In the early morning, the two boys came out of their bedrooms, preparing to leave for school, but Khan stopped them. Minutes later, Khaleda stepped out of her bedroom. “She asked me, ‘What has happened?’ I told her there was unrest outside,” he said.
Without asking anything else, she retreated to her bedroom as a member of the house staff switched on the radio, and the announcement of her husband’s death filled the room.
“She stepped back, looked at my eyes, and she understood,” the former aide-de-camp said. “She sank into the floor.”
Khan remained to support the family for two more months. “She was mentally shattered,” he said.
As Rahman had left no other personal residence for his family, the government later permanently allocated the house at 6 Moinul Road to Khaleda, and she lived there until she was evicted in 2010 by Hasina’s administration.
From first lady to first female prime minister
Following Rahman’s assassination in 1981, senior BNP leaders urged Khaleda – who was not even a party member at the time – to take on a public role.
Her rise coincided with growing public sentiments against Ershad’s military government. After taking over as president, the army chief suspended the constitution and imposed martial law.
Throughout the 1980s, the BNP and the Awami League – the two largest political parties – led parallel but often coordinated street movements calling for the restoration of parliamentary democracy.
According to Choudhury, the political scientist, a key turning point arrived in 1986, when Ershad announced a national election that the opposition denounced as unconstitutional, because martial law remained in force and political freedoms were restricted. While the Awami League eventually chose to contest the polls, the BNP, under Khaleda’s stewardship, boycotted the election.
“Her decision to boycott the 1986 election – which she denounced as illegal even as the Awami League participated – reinforced her public image as someone unwilling to trade principle for expediency,” Choudhury said.
Repeated house arrests under the Ershad regime cemented this perception. “Khaleda Zia was unwavering in her objective to remove Ershad and restore democracy,” Choudhury said. “Her readiness to endure arrest, even in ill health, earned her respect.”
The 1991 election – the first after the end of military government in December 1990 – produced a hung parliament. The BNP won 140 seats, short of the 151 needed to form a government. The Awami League won 88 seats, the Jatiya Party 35 and Jamaat-e-Islami 18.
Jamaat chief Ghulam Azam opened negotiations with Hasina. Meanwhile, Golam Wahed Choudhury, the husband of Dilara Choudhury and a former minister of communications of undivided Pakistan, arranged a discreet meeting at his Dhaka residence, bringing together Khaleda, Jamaat leaders Ghulam Azam and Motiur Rahman Nizami, and the army chief, Lieutenant General Nuruddin.
Khaleda arrived alone, without informing other BNP leaders. The negotiations ultimately paved the way to allow Bangladeshi citizenship for two very contrasting political figures.
Jamaat chief Azam, who had supported Pakistan during the war of independence, had previously been stripped of his citizenship as a result. Kader Siddique, a prominent 1971 war hero aligned with the Awami League’s political legacy, h