Khaleda Zia

Biography

Khaleda Zia was born in 1946 in Jalpaiguri, in British India, and her family moved to Dinajpur in East Bengal in 1950. She left school after marrying the army officer Ziaur Rahman in 1960. During the 1971 Liberation War she and her sons were detained by Pakistani forces. When her husband became president in 1977 she became first lady, until his assassination in May 1981.

She joined the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which her husband had founded, in January 1982, opposed Hussain Muhammad Ershad's military rule from the start, and became party chairperson in 1984, a post she held for the rest of her life. Repeatedly placed under house arrest, she refused to take part in the 1986 and 1988 elections under Ershad, earning a reputation as uncompromising, and with Sheikh Hasina she led the 1990 mass uprising that forced Ershad out that December.

The BNP won the 1991 election and she became Bangladesh's first woman prime minister, governing until 1996; after a brief government formed after the boycotted February 1996 election, she led the opposition. She returned to power after the 2001 election and governed until October 2006, a period of economic growth and also of extreme corruption ratings. The crisis that followed led to a military-backed caretaker government that detained her and her sons on corruption charges.

After the BNP's defeat in 2008 she again led the opposition until 2014 and boycotted that year's election. In 2018 she was sentenced to prison in the Zia Orphanage Trust case and later to further years in a second graft case. Freed after the fall of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 and acquitted, she died in December 2025 after a long illness and was given a state funeral.