Bangladesh’s first female prime minister, Khaleda Zia, has died at a hospital in the country’s capital, Dhaka, after a prolonged illness, according to her party and local media.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) said Khaleda died at 6am local time (00:00 GMT). She was 80 years old.
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“Our beloved national leader is no longer with us,” the BNP said.
“We pray for the forgiveness of her soul and request everyone to offer prayers for her departed soul,” it added.
Khaleda died at the Evercare Hospital in Dhaka, where she was admitted on November 23 with symptoms of a lung infection, according to The Daily Star. Her doctors said she had advanced cirrhosis of the liver, arthritis, diabetes, and chest and heart problems.
During her final days, Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, had asked the people to pray for Khaleda, calling her a “source of utmost inspiration for the nation”.
Khaleda was jailed for corruption in 2018 under then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, which also blocked her from travelling abroad for medical treatment.
She was released last year, shortly after Hasina was forced from power.
In November, Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia for her deadly crackdown on the student protesters who toppled her government.
With 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. But while Khaleda – unlike Hasina – was never accused of carrying out mass atrocities against critics, she too was a polarising figure.
Her uncompromising style while in opposition – leading election boycotts and prolonged street movements – combined with recurring allegations of corruption when she was in power, made her a figure who inspired intense loyalty among supporters and equal distrust among her critics.
Khaleda was born on August 15, 1946, in Dinajpur, then part of India’s East Bengal, now northern Bangladesh. She married army officer Ziaur Rahman in 1960 when she was about 15. Rahman rose to prominence after Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, later assuming the presidency in 1977 and founding the BNP in 1978.
Khaleda’s entry into politics was shaped not by ambition but by upheaval.
Her husband was assassinated in an abortive military military in 1981, plunging Bangladesh into deep uncertainty. Rahman – who had stabilised the country after years of coups and counter-coups – left behind a fragile political order.
Khaleda, then a 35-year-old mother of two, inherited the BNP leadership.
Initially dismissed as a political novice, she proved a formidable opponent, rallying against military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad, and later joining forces with Hasina – the daughter of independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – to remove Ershad in 1990.
The following year, Bangladesh held what was hailed as its first free election and Khaleda won a surprise victory over Hasina, having gained the support of the country’s largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami.
In doing so, Khaleda became Bangladesh’s first female prime minister and only the second woman to lead a democratic government of a mainly Muslim nation after Benazir Bhutto, elected to lead Pakistan three years earlier.
Khaleda replaced the presidential system with a parliamentary one, so that power rested with the prime minister. She also lifted restrictions on foreign investment and made primary education compulsory and free.
She lost to Hasina in the 1996 general election but came back five years later with a surprise landslide win.
Their intractable rivalry fuelled crises, including a standoff in January 2007 that brought military-backed emergency rule.
Both women were detained for more than a year.
Hasina later dominated, ruling from 2008 until her violent downfall in 2024.
In 2018, Khaleda, her son Tarique Rahman and aides were convicted of stealing some $250,000 in foreign donations received by an orphanage trust set up when she was last prime minister – charges that she said were part of a plot to keep her and her family out of politics.
She was jailed but moved to house arrest in March 2020 on humanitarian grounds as her health deteriorated.
In early 2025, Khaleda and her son were acquitted by Bangladesh’s Supreme Court in the corruption case that resulted in the 2018 jail sentences. Rahman had been acquitted of a 2004 grenade attack on Hasina a month earlier.
He returned to Bangladesh after 17 years in self-imposed exile on Thursday, and was welcomed back by large crowds of joyous supporters.
