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the seats she contested.

Khaleda, a three-time prime minister, possessed a singular electoral magic: she remains the only political leader in the country’s history to have won every single parliamentary seat she ever contested.

Her administration’s most enduring structural legacy was its pivot towards economic liberalisation and social equity. Guided by her finance minister, M Saifur Rahman, Khaleda introduced the value-added tax (VAT) in 1991 -- a difficult reform that permanently expanded the state’s revenue base -- and moved to deregulate the banking sector.

But it was in the classroom where she altered the nation’s social fabric to some extent. Recognising that development was impossible without women, her government launched a nationwide stipend programme in 1994 that made secondary education free for girls in rural areas.

In 2001, Khaleda orchestrated a stunning political comeback, leading her four-party alliance, which included Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, to a landslide victory that secured a two-thirds majority in parliament. This triumph was a rejection of the incumbent Awami League as well as a validation of her controversial strategic pivot -- an electoral coalition with conservative Islamic parties.

Her legacy is not without deep fissures. Her career was defined by a bitter, decades-long duel with Hasina and the Awami League, a rivalry that often paralysed the state. Her last tenure was punctuated by the intervention of an army-backed government in 2007 that saw both of them jailed. By late 2006, the country’s democratic machinery had ground to a violent halt. As Khaleda’s third term ended, a deadlock over who would head the interim caretaker government spilled onto the streets, turning Dhaka into a battleground.

In January 2015, Khaleda found herself in a siege-like state, her Gulshan office barricaded by police trucks loaded with sand to prevent her from leading anti-government protests. It was during this enforced isolation that she received the devastating news of the death of her younger son, Arafat Rahman Koko, in Malaysia.

Her personal tragedy was compounded by the politics of the moment; cut off from her family and the public, she was forced to mourn in isolation. The situation turned surreal when Hasina, the then prime minister, arrived at the gates to offer condolences, only to be turned away from the locked entrance.

The trajectory of Khaleda’s final decade was tragic, yet ended with a twist of historical irony. In 2018, she was sentenced to prison on corruption charges involving the Zia Orphanage Trust -- charges many decried as a politically motivated tool to keep her away from elections.

For over two years, beginning in February 2018, Khaleda was the sole inmate of the abandoned Old Dhaka Central Jail on Nazimuddin Road. While the rest of the prison population had been relocated to a new facility in Keraniganj, she remained isolated in a room of the colonial-era structure. This period of incarceration was marked by a profound loneliness that her party and international observers frequently described as solitary confinement.

In those years, it seemed her story would end in a prison cell. Under the increasingly authoritarian regime led by Hasina, Khaleda was effectively silenced, her voice absent from parliament since 2014, and her party was hollowed out. Even after a conditional release in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she remained confined to her home in Gulshan, a shadow of the figure who once commanded tens of millions.

But the wheel turned one last time. Following the massive student-led uprising in 2024 that toppled Hasina’s regime, Khaleda saw her political image resurrected. She was completely freed in August 2024 a day after Hasina fled the country. She witnessed the fall of the government that had jailed her. And her political enemy, Hasina, was sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity in November 2025.

In the days following the dramatic collapse of the Awami League government in 2024, Khaleda’s most defining political act was perhaps her silence. While her party faithful celebrated the ouster of Hasina in the streets, Khaleda refrained from issuing a single public statement of personal gloating or vindictiveness against the woman who had jailed her. Even in her first public address after six years of silence -- delivered via video link from a hospital bed -- she notably avoided mentioning her rival’s name in anger. Instead, she urged the nation to reject the “politics of vengeance” and destruction, choosing to focus her fading energy on a call for peace rather than settling the score with the nemesis who had fled.

Khaleda’s health had been in steep decline for years. By the time she was last admitted to Evercare Hospital on November 23, 2025, with heart and lung infections, she was already navigating life with a pacemaker and the scars of previous stenting procedures. She breathed her last around 6:00am yesterday at the age of 80.

Khaleda’s eldest son, Tarique Rahman, remains the undisputed heir apparent to her political dynasty, serving as the acting chairman of the BNP from London, where he had been in exile since 2008. He returned home on December 25, ending his 17-year physical detachment from Bangladesh.

In January 2025, Khaleda travelled to the UK for advanced medical treatment. That visit marked a temporary reunion of the mother and the son -- their first in seven years. As Khaleda’s health reached a critical crisis point, the party rank-and-file waited anxiously for their leader to come home. While the interim government signalled a willingness to facilitate his homecoming, Tarique’s delay, attributed to lingering security concerns and strategic timing for the upcoming elections, created a poignant backdrop to his mother’s final battles.

Today, the focus will inevitably turn to the vacuum she leaves in the BNP. But for a moment, the nation pauses to mark the passing of a person who walked out of the domestic sphere to topple a dictator. In the years that followed, she was tenacious in political survival and grit.

She survived through imprisonment, the isolation of the pandemic, the death of her younger son, and the systematic dismantling of her party. She emerged not as a vanquished prisoner, but as a unifying force for the party and millions of supporters.

Khaleda may have lost her health to the struggle, but she died having secured her indelible place in history.