A mirror in the storm
THERE are storms you sail into. And there are storms you spend a lifetime watching from the shore — knowing full well that the sea doesn’t care whether you’re a sailor or a spectator. I chose the Navy in 1986, not because I was drawn to the romance of ships or the poetry of the horizon, but because I needed order. Discipline. A world where loyalty was not a transaction but a code. In uniform, politics was not just discouraged — it was taboo. We saluted the flag, not the faction.
But the thing about storms is — they don’t ask permission to enter your life.
I grew up in a town where politics was not a profession. It was a fever. Names like BNP, JASOD, and leaders like Shah Azizur Rahman and Marfot Ali weren’t just discussed — they were inhaled. Revered. Feared. I watched it all with the wary eyes of a child who understood early that power was a dangerous kind of intimacy. It seduced. It consumed. And I wanted no part of it.
Yet, even from the deck of a frigate or the silence of a wardroom, I could see the theatre unfolding. Not the noble kind, but the grotesque. Where sycophants danced and cronies fed off the carcass of principle. Politics, once a promise, had become a parody.
And then came Khaleda Zia.
She didn’t arrive with slogans or manifestos. She arrived with grief. Her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated in 1981. The bullet that took his life didn’t just end a presidency — it detonated hers. She was not a politician then. She was a widow. A symbol. And symbols, in South Asia, are rarely allowed to mourn in peace. They are drafted into wars they never chose.
Her ascent was not meteoric. It was glacial. Quiet. Calculated. By 1983, she was vice-president of the BNP — a title that sounded ornamental but was anything but. She was learning the choreography of power: when to bow, when to strike, when to disappear.
Like Corazon Aquino. Like Sonia Gandhi. Her story began in tragedy. But unlike them, Khaleda Zia did not remain a relic of loss. She became a strategist. A street fighter. A woman who understood that in a country born of blood and betrayal, survival was not just resistance — it was reinvention.
To write about her is not to write a biography. It is to write about the architecture of power in Bangladesh. About the way grief can be weaponized. About how democracy, under military regimes, becomes a whispered prayer passed between protestors in the dark.
She is not a saint. She is not a villain. She is something more dangerous: a woman who learned to wield silence like a blade.
And as I watched her from my naval world — where we were trained to read the weather, to anticipate the storm — I realised something unsettling: the storm was not outside. It was inside. It was in the institutions. In the headlines. In the handshake that hid a dagger.
Her story doesn’t promise happy endings. It doesn’t offer neat lessons. It gives us something else: the raw, unvarnished truth about power — its cost, its seduction, its danger.
In Khaleda Zia’s life, you don’t find the fairy tale. You find the thriller.
This is not a tribute. It is not a condemnation. It is a reckoning.
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The anti-autocratic movement and rise to leadership (1983–1990)
WHEN the streets of Dhaka burned with slogans and the stench of tear gas, she walked into history — not as a firebrand, but as a silhouette of resolve. There was no manifesto clutched to her chest, no rehearsed rhetoric spilling from her lips. What she carried instead was something far heavier: grief, reforged into grit.
Her husband’s assassination tore through her world like a lightning strike. Ziaur Rahman was gone, and with him the fragile scaffolding that held together a party and a promise. In that vacuum, vultures circled — polished men with polished lies whispering in corridors, wagering that the grieving widow would vanish into mourning, a relic rather than a rival.
They were wrong.
Khaleda Zia did not enter politics to conquer it. She entered because history gave her no exit. At first, she was a symbol — a portrait of loss BNP could parade, a name to hold together fragments of loyalty. But symbols have a way of learning to speak. And when they do, they terrify the men who once owned their silence.
By 1983, the widow draped in white had transformed into something far more formidable. She became the strategist behind closed doors, the quiet architect of alliances. It was she who stitched together a seven-party coalition from factions that trusted each other as much as snakes trust ladders. This wasn’t elegance; it was survival — and survival, in Bangladesh, is its own form of genius.
She did not lead from behind podiums or palace gates. She led from the streets — where the air reeked of sweat and fear, where the cost of defiance was measured in bruises and broken bones. When she called for the Gherao of the Secretariat, it wasn’t theatre — it was siege. When they locked her behind doors, she turned confinement into credibility. Seven times they tried to silence her with house arrest. Seven times, the silence roared back louder.
From my own station in the Navy, I watched the tremors ripple through the establishment. The cantonments whispered. The wardrooms buzzed with cautious speculation. We were trained to serve the chain of command, not the chaos of politics — but the chaos had begun to seep through every bulkhead of authority. Every protest, every march, every crackdown was like a tide rising against the old order. In those days, we didn’t yet know which way the current would flow — only that it was strong enough to drag generals from their thrones.
The widow became the warrior. Hartals, barricades, marches — these were not slogans; they were strategies etched in asphalt and blood. With every clash, every tear gas cloud, every funeral she walked behind, her image hardened — not into marble, but into something far more dangerous: inevitability.
Then came December 6, 1990. The day the General fell. Not because foreign diplomats wagged their fingers. Not because the army rediscovered morality. He fell because a woman refused to kneel. She turned memory into a movement and grief into a weapon. That day was not a coronation. It was a reckoning. And at its centre stood Khaleda Zia — unyielding, unrelenting and utterly unplanned by the men who once dismissed her as a placeholder.
I remember the silence on our ship’s deck that evening, as news crackled over the radio. We were sailors on a restless sea, watching a storm we could not fight, a tide we could not turn. And in that storm, one figure stood taller than the rest.
She had stepped into the firestorm. And she had learned to command it.
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Trailblazer: the first term of Khaleda Zia (1991–1996)
IN 1991, Bangladesh exhaled — tentatively, almost fearfully — after decades of turbulence marked by war, coups, assassinations, and the iron grip of authoritarian rule. Then, almost imperceptibly, history shifted. For the first time, the people placed their trust in a woman who had not sought power but had been shaped by tragedy into the mould of leadership. Begum Khaleda Zia became the first female prime minister of Bangladesh, only the second woman in the Muslim world to ascend to such power after Benazir Bhutto. It was more than an electoral victory — it was an earthquake beneath centuries of patriarchal stone.
Her rise carried a meaning deeper than symbolism. It was the beginning of a new political architecture. The 12th Amendment of August 1991, passed with rare unanimity, restored parliamentary democracy after 16 years of presidential dominance. For a fleeting moment, the nation’s leaders spoke in a single voice, and the sound was that of a country daring to dream again.
But dreams in Bangladesh are fragile. They live and die not in manifestos but in the grit of ministries, in the whispers of bureaucrats, and sometimes, in the smoke of street protests. Khaleda Zia assumed office bearing both the weight of expectation and the shadow of scepticism. Yet in those early years, there was purpose — real, tangible and even audacious.
Education became her first battlefield of hope. At a time when most Bangladeshi children barely stayed in school for two years, and when educating girls was dismissed as unnecessary, her government tore down those barriers. Primary education was declared free and compulsory. Girls were allowed free education up to the 10th grade. Food-for-Education programs and stipends turned hunger into opportunity. By 1995, SSC pass rates had more than doubled, and girls were closing the gap. The education budget swelled by 60 per cent in 1994, the single largest sectoral allocation of its time. These were not just policies — they were promises that the future would be written in classrooms, not in the language of poverty.
Economics was her other frontier. The age of closed doors was ending, and Khaleda Zia did not hesitate to make the hard pivot towards globalisation. A Privatization Board was formed to dismantle inefficiencies. The Bank Company Act and Financial Institutions Act fortified the financial sector. The signing of the GATT agreement in 1993 placed Bangladesh firmly on the map of global trade. A new Export Processing Zone near Dhaka opened its gates, inviting foreign investment and ushering in jobs, factories, and a new lexicon of growth.
But governance is never just policy — it is also people. And people are fickle. From my own wardroom in the Navy, I watched decisions ripple down from Dhaka like distant thunder. At first, her resolve was striking — after a devastating cyclone damaged Naval and Air assets, she retired both the Navy and Air Force chiefs, along with senior officers, signalling that no arm of the state could remain idle when lives were lost. Later, the Bandartilla crisis claimed more top brass, leaving a vacuum of competence.
Her positive strategic stroke was the push for institutional autonomy — particularly in the judiciary and higher education. For the first time, conversations around strengthening the independence of the courts and empowering universities began to gather force under her watch. This was not mere rhetoric; it was an early signal that she understood the architecture of a modern state must rest on strong, impartial institutions.
Yet, not all her moves were wise. One controversial decision was allowing lawmakers to continue importing duty-free luxury cars, a practice that became a symbol of political privilege. It eroded moral high ground and gave critics ammunition to brand her government as elitist and indulgent at a time when the masses expected austerity and integrity.
Over time, sycophancy crept in where merit once stood. Capable officers were sidelined; mediocrity thrived under the canopy of connections. For this, Khaleda Zia cannot be wholly blamed — she allowed autonomy to the services — but her appointees failed to honour talent. She entrusted DGFI to a Major General who would one day revolt. Chiefs she counted on defected to the Awami League. Bureaucrats who once pledged loyalty abandoned her when the winds shifted towards Janatar Mancha. Was this her own judgment failing? Or the whispers of those who steered her choices? I cannot say. But I know this: when loyalty becomes a tradable commodity, stability is always the price.
And then came her greatest misfortune: her opposition was not a principled alternative but a cult of vengeance. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina — a woman whose politics carried the ferocity of grievance and the ruthlessness of a sociopath — turned every street into a war zone. This was no parliamentary rivalry; it was attrition by fire — strikes, blockades, and blood. The media, instead of being an impartial mirror, became a weapon — crowded with disgruntled leftists and fuelled by corporate cronies who thrived in chaos. Every policy was doubted, every success poisoned by propaganda. It was as if the government was trying to build with one hand while fending off arsonists with the other.
Still, her first term left an indelible mark. Direct mayoral elections returned power to the people. The outdated Upazila system was dismantled, replaced by a more responsive two-tier structure. Thana Development Committees sprouted at the grassroots, like roots clutching at restless soil.
Her first term was not flawless — no first act of leadership ever is. But it was bold, reformist and infused with possibility. It proved that a widow who once walked into politics with grief in her eyes could govern with steel in her spine. And yet, as I looked out from the deck of a naval ship, I understood this: vision without vigilance is fragile. And in the murky waters of Bangladeshi politics, the sharks never stop circling.
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The limits of reform: political gridlock and the crisis of legitimacy (1994–1996)
FOR all the bold reforms that defined Khaleda Zia’s early years, Bangladeshi politics was never played on solid ground — it was a game on shifting sand. And by 1994, that sand began to move.
It started small — a by-election, just one seat in the vast theatre of parliament. But in this country, a single spark can set the prairie on fire. Allegations of rigging — whispered first in drawing rooms, then shouted through loudspeakers — gave the Awami League the excuse they had been waiting for. Sheikh Hasina and her cohorts walked out of parliament, dragging the Jatiya Party and Jamaat-e-Islami with them. Suddenly, politics was no longer debate — it was street warfare in slow motion.
And the opposition did not come to play by the rules. They came to burn them. This was not dissent; this was destabilisation by design. Awami League under Sheikh Hasina had shed the skin of democratic protest and mutated into a hooligan cult — its playbook written in chaos: hartals, blockades, arson, blood. Their propaganda machine roared to life, powered by a media that had abandoned impartiality, bloated with disgruntled leftists and fattened by corporate cronies who thrived on turmoil.
Then came their masterstroke: Janatar Mancha — the so-called ‘People’s Stage’. But it was no stage; it was a siege platform. A theatre of treachery pitched at the very gates of power. There, under the open sky, government employees — servants of the republic — lined up to swear fealty to the opposition, cameras rolling. It was sedition, livestreamed before livestreaming was even a thing. This was no longer just politics; this was the state bleeding from within.
And in this gallery of betrayal stood names that history should never forgive. Mayor Mohammad Hanif, the man who was supposed to represent civic order, became an architect of anarchy. He wasn’t merely a spectator — he was the backstage manager of this street carnival, orchestrating logistics, rallying crowds, and turning City Corporation resources into political ammunition. Bureaucrats followed suit, scurrying like rats towards the louder drumbeat. They sabotaged files, stalled decisions, and made the machinery of governance grind to a halt — all while flashing defiant smiles from the Mancha.
Khaleda Zia fought back — not with whispers, but with the full weight of her office. Yet the tide was too strong, too synchronized. The general election of February 1996 should have been her coronation — another term to finish what she had begun. Instead, it became a hollow spectacle. Yes, BNP won in a landslide on paper — but the streets told a darker truth. Nearly nine out of ten voters stayed home. The silence of the ballot boxes roared louder than any victory speech. Legality was hers; legitimacy was not.
And here is where Khaleda Zia’s steel showed — not in clinging, but in letting go. She could have entrenched herself. She had the machinery, the muscle, the mandate of law if not of love. But she chose the constitution over chaos. In parliament thick with smoke and venom, she made the unthinkable choice: to step down and hand power to a caretaker government. The 13th Amendment — the legal birth of that system — was not drafted in hope but hammered out in desperation, a white flag disguised as reform.
It should have restored calm. Instead, it opened a darker chapter — one where the ghosts of 1975 stirred again. Because during the caretaker government, as the nation held its breath for fair elections, the military felt a tremor in its spine. And then came the name whispered like a storm warning: General Nasim.
The chief of army staff — sworn to the Republic — suddenly flirting with rebellion. It wasn’t a textbook coup, not yet. It was a slow mutiny, dressed in patriotism, perfumed with ambition. Orders began to ripple through ranks in cryptic tones. And for the first time in decades, Bangladesh stared into the abyss of its old nightmare: tanks on the streets, bayonets in the breeze.
General Nasim’s game was short-lived — quashed before it could bloom into blood. But it left a scar, a warning: when politics infects the chain of command, the republic teeters on the edge of the abyss.
The caretaker system limped forward, elections were held, and Sheikh Hasina walked into Ganabhaban for the first time as prime minister. But what lingered was the truth no one wanted to say aloud: in Bangladesh, power is never truly transferred — it is seized, stolen, or surrendered under siege.
To be continued.
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Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
