Netra News obituary for the first female prime minister of Bangladesh
She became only the second woman ever elected prime minister in a Muslim-majority country, leading a party that liked to cast itself as the centre-right antidote to the Awami League’s secular nationalism. By the time her Bangladesh Nationalist Party returned to power in 2001, she cut an unambiguously modern figure: bright georgette saris, a carefully lifted bouffant, bold lipstick when the mood struck, and eyebrows that were thin and sharply arched. Conservatives clutched their pearls, but the party she inherited after the assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, happily relied on those same conservatives for votes. Under her watch the BNP forged alliances with Jamaat-e-Islami and other hardcore Islamist factions, and she persuaded clerics who might have deemed women’s leadership un-Islamic, to accept hers.
Was she then a closet liberal or an architect of resurgent Islamism more visible in Bangladesh today? As with much about Begum Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first ever female head of government, the truth sat somewhere in the middle.
In office, she pushed strongly for girls’ education, making schooling compulsory with bursaries up to eighth grade. In a 1993 interview with the New York Times, she defended the country’s daughters and spoke of Bangladesh’s milder, more accommodating strain of Islam. Her government took an uncommonly tough stance on child marriage – executive magistrates raided villages to stop under-age marriages, a zeal rarely shown before or since. It stood in sharp contrast to Sheikh Hasina – her rival – who would later argue for weakening the minimum age bar for girls.
Perhaps her most consequential move for women was strengthening domestic violence legislation by setting up a dedicated tribunal, which resulted in precautionary pre-trial jailing of numerous husbands, often on disputed grounds. The move was sweeping, contentious, and, in the eyes of supporters, transformative. Crucially, because it came from her, a leader trusted by the right, it passed with far less uproar than it would have if proposed by the Awami League. On many such occasions, she used her conservative credentials to quietly advance reforms that the religious right itself would otherwise have resisted.
What shaped these impulses is harder to trace. Bangladesh does not do political biography particularly well. Khaleda herself once acknowledged that she had no formal higher education; there is no record of her going to college. Married at 15 to a photogenic young officer in the Pakistan Army, she spent her early years moving between military postings. Did her truncated schooling fuel her enthusiasm for educating girls? Did early marriage shape her opposition to child marriage? She never said, and her public life allowed little room for introspection.
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Born in 1946 to a modest businessman in Feni, Khaleda came of age as the subcontinent convulsed. After the 1965 war, in which her husband fought for Pakistan, she gave birth to her first son, Tarique. By 1971, when Ziaur Rahman defected and joined Bangladesh’s independence struggle, she went into hiding with her children – only to be discovered and detained by Pakistani forces until the war’s end….
https://netra.news/2025/begum-khaleda-zia-obituary-en/
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