Dhaka: Khaleda Zia’s tenure as Bangladesh Prime Minister coincided with some of the most challenging periods in India–Bangladesh relations, an era marked by visible hostility and a series of missed strategic opportunities between the two neighbours.
Zia, a three-time Prime Minister and long-time chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), died early Tuesday morning after a prolonged illness. She was 80.
Her death brings to an end a political journey that shaped Bangladesh’s post-independence history for more than four decades.
Rising from a largely private life, she became the country’s first female Prime Minister and a defining figure in its post-independence history.
Khaleda Zia was born in 1945 in Jalpaiguri, part of Greater Dinajpur in undivided India. Khaleda later moved with her family to what was then East Pakistan, following the partition of India.
In 1960, she married Ziaur Rahman, then a captain in the Pakistani Army. Ziaur Rahman later revolted against Pakistani forces during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
He went on to serve as the President of Bangladesh in 1977 and formed the BNP the following year.
After Ziaur Rahman’s assassination on May 30, 1981, BNP plunged into a serious crisis, prompting senior leaders and BNP workers to urge Khaleda Zia to assume a leadership role in the party.
She was appointed as the Vice-President of the party on January 12, 1984, and was elected BNP’s chairperson on May 10 in the same year. She retained her position through successive party councils in 1993, 2009 and 2016, cementing a nearly 41-year tenure as BNP chairperson.
Following BNP’s victory in the 1991 parliamentary election, Khaleda Zia was sworn in as the first female Prime Minister of Bangladesh.
She assumed the office of the Prime Minister for a second consecutive term after the 1996 national elections, which were held amid a boycott from major opposition parties.
She was sworn in as Prime Minister for the third time on October 10, 2001.
In her early years, Khaleda Zia adopted a cautious and, in many respects, adversarial posture towards New Delhi, a stance that shaped bilateral ties for over a decade.
Zia consistently opposed overland transit and connectivity initiatives with India, both during her time as Prime Minister and later as Leader of the Opposition, a role she held twice between 1996 and 2014.
As Prime Minister, she flatly denied India transit rights through Bangladeshi territory to access its northeastern states, arguing that such arrangements would compromise Bangladesh’s security and sovereignty.
She went further to claim that toll-free movement of Indian trucks on Bangladeshi roads amounted to “slavery”.
Her resistance also extended to diplomatic agreements.
Zia opposed the renewal of the 1972 Indo-Bangladesh Friendship Treaty, widely regarded by strategic experts as significant from a military standpoint.
She argued the treaty had “shackled” Bangladesh and constrained its independence.
Positioning her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as a “protector of Bangladesh’s interests”, Zia often framed her policies as a defence against what she described as Indian domination.
This rhetoric was evident even years later. At a rally in Dhaka in 2018, when Sheikh Hasina was Prime Minister, and Zia was Leader of the Opposition, she criticised Hasina for exempting India from paying transit duties.
Another major source of friction during Zia’s tenure was India’s Farakka Barrage, operational since 1975 to divert water from the Ganges into the Hooghly River through a feeder canal.
While the barrage helps reduce silt, improves navigability around Kolkata Port and supplies fresh water to the city, Zia maintained that it deprived Bangladesh of its rightful share of Ganges water.
In 2007, she accused India of deliberately opening sluice gates to aggravate flooding in Bangladesh.
Her foreign policy choices further heightened tensions.
In 2002, Zia actively pursued defence cooperation with China.
India viewed this as a direct strategic challenge and responded by increasing diplomatic pressure. This included a counter-offensive in which Delhi accused the BNP government of sheltering separatist groups and terrorists operating in India’s northeastern states.
Zia had earlier described insurgent outfits such as ULFA and NSCN as “freedom fighters”.
During her tenure, India alleged that anti-India terror groups operated freely from Bangladeshi soil. The 2004 Chittagong arms haul, intended for Indian insurgents, minority violence within Bangladesh, and the near-total absence of cooperation on counter-terrorism further strained relations.
Bilateral relations began to improve only after Zia left office. However, her stance towards India showed signs of evolution after 2012, when she visited Delhi to meet then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
During the visit, she pledged that any future BNP government would act against terrorist groups using Bangladeshi soil to target India. The visit, undertaken at India’s invitation, was widely interpreted as a strategic shift in BNP thinking ahead of the 2014 elections.
That outreach continued after 2014, including meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
PM Modi met Zia in Dhaka in June 2015 during his visit to Bangladesh, when she was serving as Leader of the Opposition.
Despite these engagements, underlying tensions persisted.
Between 2016 and 2024, Zia repeatedly returned to anti-India rhetoric, accusing New Delhi of backing authoritarianism and drawing attention to unresolved issues such as border killings.
These positions stood in sharp contrast to the more conciliatory approach of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League.
A noticeable thaw emerged after August 2024, following Sheikh Hasina’s ouster, when the BNP signalled a commitment to “equal and respectful” relations with India and distanced itself from the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami.
Khaleda Zia’s political life thus remained defined by confrontation and enduring complexity in Bangladesh’s engagement with its most influential neighbour.
(IANS)
