Sheikh Hasina: child of the revolution who eroded Bangladesh’s democracy

The world’s longest-serving female leader was, according to her son, “in good spirits, but disheartened and disappointed in the lack of gratitude of the people of Bangladesh”.
After weeks of protests, more than 300 deaths and increased international criticism of her government’s slide into autocracy, the long rule of Sheikh Hasina ended on Monday as she fled the country she had led for a combined total of more than 20 years.
The daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president who led his country to independence in 1971, Hasina flew to India, where she was born in 1947 and where she was granted asylum in 1975, after a military coup caused the deaths of most of her family.
It was 49 years ago this month that her father, mother, young brothers and 15 others were shot dead in what were called the “midnight murders”. Hasina, her husband and her sister Sheikh Rehana were travelling in Germany at the time and so survived.
Ironically for a woman deposed by a student uprising, while at Dhaka University studying literature, Hasina built a reputation as a student leader and feminist. Her political bent resumed when she returned to Bangladesh from a six-year exile in India in 1981, after being elected leader of her late father’s Awami League (AL) party.
Hasina joined forces with a woman whom she would later imprison: Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP), and widow of Ziaur Rahman, a military officer and politician who served as president from 1977 until his assassination in 1981. With an astute show of unity, at least on the surface, the two women led a pro-democracy mass uprising in 1990 that forced the resignation of the despotic president, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, a general who had seized power in 1982.
The two women slipped into a viscerally fierce rivalry ahead of the resultant elections and it was Zia who won power in the 1991 vote. Hasina lead the AL to victory in 1996, Zia snatching the premiership back in the 2001 election. In those years of turmoil it was Hasina who spent time in prison on conspiracy charges.
Referring to the traditional honorific for Muslim women, the Bangladeshi media called it the “battle of the Begums” but as Hasina held power from 2009 through the next five elections, the term began to slip from use. It seemed Hasina had won. Zia, whose late husband had been a bitter rival to Hasina’s father for the title of “founder of the nation”, was sentenced to 17 years on corruption charges in 2018.
As prime minister, Hasina took major steps in hauling Bangladesh on to the global economic stage. She was internationally lauded for bringing stability to the nation and for her decisive action in tackling Islamic extremism.
Hasina was globally praised as a humanitarian for welcoming into Bangladesh the million Rohingya refugees who poured over the border in 2017 in a desperate effort to escape genocidal attacks by the Myanmar army.
Winning hefty development funding from the World Bank among others, Hasina pushed through large-scale infrastructure projects and digitialisation. Between 2009 and 2023 Bangladesh’s economy grew by an average of 6% annually and poverty levels dropped.
One of the world’s poorest countries when it won independence from Pakistan in 1971, today more than 95% of the 170 million population have access to electricity, with per capita income overtaking India in 2020.
The benefits of the economic growth achieved by her government were felt mostly by the rich – whose wealth has grown at among the fastest rate of anywhere in the world – while everyone else struggled with rising living costs.
This inequity drove the students in their protests against Hasina and the quota system, which denied many of them government jobs after having had to fund their own university studies.
Last year she vowed to turn Bangladesh into a “prosperous and developed country” but with about 18 million young people out of work the promise seemed thin. Her premiership was increasingly tarnished by human rights abuses in a Bangladesh that was backsliding into autocracy. Reports grew of extrajudicial killings, the imprisonment and disappearances of journalists and opposition figures, and of corruption and wealth appropriation by her government and associates.
The daughter of the revolution was, said her critics, destroying the very democracy she had grown up battling for.
Hasina defended her authority in an interview with Time magazine last year:
“The BNP was formed by a military dictator who violated the constitution and kept army rule through guns,” she told Time. “They say there is no democracy. But when there was a military ruler ruling the country, was there democracy? Even Khaleda Zia ruled like a military dictator.”
In January Hasina’s win at a disputed election boycotted by the opposition fed the growing unrest. In July it exploded on to the streets with the protests that led to her downfall.
At 76, the avid reader of fiction and lover of fishing may now be facing her final exile and the end of a dynasty’s rule over Bangladesh.
With her husband, MA Wazed Miah, a respected physicist who died in 2009, Hasina had two children. Her daughter, Saima Wazed, is the south-east Asian regional director for the World Health Organization, and her son, Sajeeb Wazed, followed his family into Bangladeshi politics.
On Tuesday her son said the people had been “very, very ungrateful” towards his mother and himself, and they were now “done with politics”.
“The people will get what they deserve,” he said. “My mother is very disheartened with the people of Bangladesh. She will now come and stay with me and with my sister and play with her grandchildren.”