Gender and Democratic Politics in Bangladesh

Abstract

Since the restoration of democratic politics in 1991, Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajed have alternated as prime minister and leader of the opposition, through elections in 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2008. Sheikh Hasina is the elder daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or Bangobondhu (Friend of Bengal). Widely recognized as the leader of the nationalist movement that culminated in the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, he was assassinated in August 1975 along with most of his family. The only immediate family members to be spared this fate were his daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, then in Germany. Although initially banned from entering Bangladesh for several years, the sisters did eventually return and in 1981, Sheikh Hasina assumed the mantle of leadership of her father’s political party, the Awami League (founded in 1949). Begum Zia is the widow of Ziaur Rahman, an army offi cer and a prominent leader in the 1971 war of independence who re-emerged on the national scene in the chaotic aftermath of Mujib’s assassination. He became chief martial law administrator in 1976, president in 1977, and founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in 1978. He too was assassinated, in May 1981, and the leadership of the party soon passed to his widow Khaleda Zia. Both women, then in their mid-thirties, entered the fray in the 1980s with little or no political experience (Sheikh Hasina had been involved in student politics) and throughout that decade they consolidated their positions of leadership in their respective parties and collaborated as part of the mass pro-democracy movement that brought down the military regime of Zia’s successor, Hussain M. Ershad, in December 1990.