Khaleda Zia

Khaleda Zia (15 August 1946 – 30 December 2025) was a Bangladeshi politician who twice served as prime minister of Bangladesh, from 1991 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2006 — the first woman to head the country's government and the second female prime minister in the Muslim world, after Benazir Bhutto. The widow of President Ziaur Rahman, she entered politics after his assassination in 1981 and chaired the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) from 1984 until her death, the longest chairpersonship in the party's history. With Sheikh Hasina she dominated Bangladeshi politics for three decades. Her birth date is documented as disputed: her official documents give three different dates, and this record follows the article's current dating, with the variants stated in the data note. ^{1 2}

Khaleda Khanam was born at Jalpaiguri in Bengal, British India, the third of five children of Iskander Majumdar, a tea-business broker from Feni, and Taiyaba Majumder. The family moved to Dinajpur in East Bengal in 1950. She attended schools in Dinajpur and described herself as self-educated. In 1960 she married Ziaur Rahman, then a captain in the Pakistan Army, and took his name. During the 1971 Liberation War she was detained by the Pakistani forces with her two sons, Tarique and Arafat, until the war's end. When her husband became president in 1977 she served as first lady until his assassination on 30 May 1981. ¹

Khaleda Zia joined the BNP at the start of 1982 and rose quickly: senior vice-president in 1983, then chairperson in May 1984, a post she held for the rest of her life. Under her leadership the BNP boycotted the 1986 and 1988 elections under the Ershad regime, earning her a reputation as an "uncompromising leader", and she endured repeated house arrests. Together with Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, her party helped lead the 1990 mass uprising that ended military rule. ¹

The BNP won the February 1991 election, and Khaleda Zia became prime minister under a restored parliamentary system. Her first government introduced educational, economic and administrative reforms; her party also formed a short-lived government after the boycotted February 1996 election before handing power to a caretaker administration. She returned as prime minister after the 2001 election. The article records GDP growth, foreign investment and rising female literacy in her second term, alongside Bangladesh's ranking as the world's most corrupt country in the Corruption Perceptions Index of those years. Her second premiership ended in the political crisis of 2006–2007 and a military-backed caretaker government, which charged her and her sons with corruption. ¹

After the BNP's 2008 defeat she was driven from her official residence and boycotted the 2014 election. In 2018 she was sentenced to a total of seventeen years in prison for corruption; released on health grounds in 2020, she remained restricted until the July 2024 uprising, after which she was freed and acquitted of all charges, and in 2025 she received a full presidential pardon. After years of illness she died in a Dhaka hospital on 30 December 2025 and was given a state funeral; she was buried beside her husband at the Mausoleum of Ziaur Rahman in Dhaka. Her elder son, Tarique Rahman, succeeded her as BNP chairperson. ¹

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