Begum Khaleda Zia, the Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is a figure defined by resilience and determination. Rising from the role of a housewife to becoming one of the most prominent political figures in Bangladesh, her journey has been marked by both triumph and adversity.
She has served as Prime Minister three times. Khaleda Zia was elected as the country's Prime Minister for the first time in 1991. Then, in 1996, she won the February 15 election and was elected as the Prime Minister for the second time and in 2001, she was elected as the Prime Minister for the third time.
Khaleda Zia served as the Chairperson of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) twice. She has a unique record in the history of elections, having contested 23 seats in five parliamentary elections and won all of them.
Born on August 15, 1945 in Jalpaiguri, India, Begum Khaleda Zia married the then Pakistan Army Cadet Officer Ziaur Rahman in 1960. She was under house arrest with her two children for 9 long months of the Liberation War.
On November 7, 1975, through the solidarity and revolution of the soldiers and the people, the then Major General Ziaur Rahman became involved in the governance of the state of Bangladesh. Later, he was elected president.
On May 30, 1981, President Ziaur Rahman was martyred in the Circuit House of Chattogram due to domestic and foreign conspiracies. At that time, Khaleda Zia was a housewife. She was staying in the Dhaka Cantonment with her two children.
As a political party, the BNP was in turmoil and disorientated. Various discussions continued about who would take over the reins of the party after Ziaur Rahman. On January 2, 1982, Khaleda Zia joined the BNP as a primary member. Within a year, she gained praise for her political wisdom.
In March of the following year, she was promoted to the position of senior vice chairman of the party. She was elected as the acting chairperson of the party on January 12, 1984 and as the chairperson unopposed on May 10 of the same year.
Khaleda Zia was elected as the BNP Chairperson for the second time in the party's Fourth Council on September 1, 1993, for the third time in the Fifth National Council on December 8, 2009, and for the fourth time in the party's Tenth Council on March 19, 2016.
She faced various adversities immediately after taking charge of the BNP. She kept the party united and uncompromisingly launched a movement against Ershad's dictatorship. Khaleda Zia was arrested on September 3, 2007 during the former caretaker government of the army-backed One-Eleven. After a long imprisonment, she was released on bail in all the cases after a legal battle.
While she was in prison, attempts were made to send her into exile abroad. But she refused to go. Then, when the Awami League came to power, Khaleda Zia was evicted from her cantonment house in retaliation on November 13, 2010.
During the Awami League government, 37 cases were filed against Khaleda Zia. She was sentenced in the Zia Orphanage Trust and Zia Charitable Trust cases. Her sentence was commuted by the government's executive order on August 6. Currently, two cases are pending against her.
Khaleda Zia became an uncompromising leader through the movement against the dictator Ershad after joining politics. Since then, she has been an uncompromising woman of Bangladesh.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
