In opposition: in company of fire and ash (1996–2001)
HER fall in March 1996 was quiet, almost unsettling in its stillness. No gunfire. No soldiers on the streets. Just a resignation letter — signed in haste, carried through corridors heavy with history. Khaleda Zia walked away from power without the melodrama of coups or bloodshed. But make no mistake — she did not walk away broken.
She moved into opposition the way a seasoned general retreats to the hills — not defeated, merely regrouping. The Awami League had taken the throne, Sheikh Hasina finally tasting the intoxicating wine of power she had craved for years. And with that first sip, the mask slipped.
Her regime — sold to the people as the dawn of democracy — quickly revealed its darker anatomy. Oppression became policy. Corruption turned systemic. Nepotism slithered into every corridor of power. The bureaucracy, once the spine of the state, was bent and branded with the green-and-red of partisan loyalty. Awamilization was no longer a whisper; it was a manifesto. Files moved only for friends. Promotions were no longer earned — they were inherited through bloodlines and party flags.
The military — supposed to stand aloof from politics — was not spared. The hierarchy became a chessboard, tilted in favour of Awami loyalists. Postings, commands, procurement — everything began to smell of politics. For the first time since independence, officers and sailors spoke openly — not in hushed tones, but in blunt confession — about their family ties to Awami League and their disdain for BNP and Jamaat. What had once been unthinkable became routine: partisan pride worn like a badge inside the barracks.
And outside, in the streets, the law unravelled. Crime fattened under political patronage. The very party that claimed to be the custodian of liberation turned law and order into a hostage. Opponents were vilified — not just politically, but personally, branded as traitors, collaborators, enemies of the state. Violence became an institution; fear became a currency.
Meanwhile, the media — swollen with disgruntled leftists and corporate opportunists — became Hasina’s megaphone, spitting venom at Khaleda, painting her as a relic of autocracy. Most columns andÌý most editorials dripped with malice dressed as morality.
For five long years, Khaleda Zia endured the fire. She watched. She listened. She plotted — not for vengeance, but for survival, and for the ultimate return.
And return she did.
October 2001 was not an election; it was a reckoning. The verdict swept across the country like a monsoon tide. Forty-six per cent of the popular vote. Two-thirds of parliament. BNP came roaring back — not alone, but with an alliance forged from ambition and necessity: Jatiya Party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Islami Oikya Jote.
The promise was bold, almost romantic: to cleanse the soil of corruption, to strangle the roots of terror, to rebuild a nation that could finally stand tall. For a time, it felt real.
For a fleeting moment, it seemed as if Bangladesh was stepping out of its own shadow. But in this land, peace is a fragile thing — like a candle trembling in the wind. And soon, the wind came howling.
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Third term: governance on knife’s edge (2001–2006)
HER third term was meant to be a coronation. Instead, it became a crucible.
BNP returned to power in October 2001 with thunderous legitimacy — a two-thirds majority, an alliance stitched together with ambition and necessity, and a promise: No more chaos. No more vendetta. This time, governance will triumph. But in Bangladesh, promises are like rafts in a cyclone — they don’t float for long.
Instead of breaking the vicious cycle of partisan favouritism, BNP slid deeper into its coils. What the Awami League had planted, BNP watered. The bureaucracy and military — institutions that once stood like granite — were bent like bamboo in a storm. Sycophancy became policy. Meritocracy was sacrificed at the altar of loyalty.
I saw it with my own eyes. The Navy — once a bastion of professionalism — turned into a marketplace of patronage. The rot had begun earlier, under Hasina’s alibi of rehabilitating ‘Shadhinatar Sopoker Shakti,’ which was just code for stacking the deck with political stooges. Instead of reversing that cancer, Khaleda’s government fed it.
Four seasoned senior officers — men with decades of salt in their veins — were shoved into retirement, their careers ended like discarded logbooks. Why? To clear the deck for a man whose seamanship was questioned even in whispers — a politically shielded favourite who wore power like an ill-fitting uniform. Junior officers, emboldened by invisible political hands, strutted where they once saluted. The wardroom buzzed with talk that once would have been mutiny: ‘Family Awami, BNP, Jamaat’ — politics had seeped into the very steel of the fleet.
Why did this happen? Some said paranoia. The ghosts of Janatar Manch and General Nasim’s mutiny still haunted Khaleda. She feared betrayal more than she prized merit. But in politics, paranoia is expensive — and in 2001–2006, BNP paid in blood and legitimacy.
The doubts began when Badruddoza Chowdhury was humiliated out of the presidency to make way for Iajuddin Ahmed — a pliant figure whose loyalty mattered more than law. The whispers grew louder with the 14th Amendment in 2004 — a move sold as ‘judicial reform’ but reeking of opportunism. By extending the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, BNP thought it had secured a safety net for friendly verdicts and constitutional control. Instead, it triggered a firestorm. The opposition screamed ‘constitutional vandalism,’ and the bench, once neutral, became a battlefield of suspicion. That one miscalculation would come back to haunt Khaleda in the most brutal way: the caretaker crisis.
While BNP wrestled with its own contradictions, Sheikh Hasina waged war — not in parliament, but in the streets. Awami League boycotted the House, spurned dialogue, and unleashed a campaign of attrition. Hartals, blockades, gheraos — the old playbook of anarchy came roaring back, funded by corporate patrons and amplified by a media drunk on partisanship. Dhaka burned while politics bled.
By 2004, the conflict turned deadly. The grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina at an AL rally — twenty-four dead, hundreds maimed — shocked the nation to its marrow. Awami League accused BNP not of negligence, but of conspiracy. The last threads of trust snapped. From then on, politics was trench warfare: zero-sum, no prisoners.
BNP’s alliances deepened the divide. Bringing Jamaat-e-Islami into the cabinet was branded a Faustian bargain, a sellout to political Islam. And then came Operation Clean Heart — an anti-crime campaign launched with soldiers instead of sheriffs. It cleaned the streets — but mostly of BNP’s own mastans, while Awami goons vanished like ghosts. The imbalance tilted the local muscle war in AL’s favour. The creation of RAB, hailed as a guardian, later became a spectre — a force of terror that would one day turn on BNP itself.
And then came terror of another kind. August 17, 2005 — Bangladesh woke to 500 bombs exploding in 63 districts in 30 minutes. HUJI and JMB announced themselves with fire and steel. The government reeled, accused of being soft on militancy even as it scrambled to crush the beasts it had never unleashed. The narrative of BNP as a bulwark of stability collapsed overnight.
Inside the cantonments, politics festered. The same structural rot that began with favouritism metastasized. Senior officers whispered about compromised chains of command, about the day when uniforms would no longer stand above flags. And when Khaleda stood at BAF Base Bashar, her last address to the forces, she spoke — not like a victor, but like a woman bargaining with history: ‘Continuation is necessary’. It sounded less like confidence, more like confession.
By October 2006, the clock ran out. The Constitution demanded a neutral caretaker to oversee the next election. BNP, cornered by its own 14th Amendment, tried to keep control by installing Iajuddin Ahmed as chief adviser. That single act lit the fuse.
On October 29, Khaleda Zia stepped down. Not in triumph, but in turmoil. What came next was not an election. It was a storm. A storm that would tear through institutions, shred the constitution, and drag Bangladesh into its darkest political abyss since 1975.
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Into the storm: iron silence and shadows of 1/11 (2007–2008)
JANUARY 2007. Dhaka was a city of whispers. The air smelled of gun oil and rain. The Constitution — our brittle shield — had cracked under the weight of mistrust. The promised election had turned into a war of attrition. Hartals bled into blockades. Streets were hostage to fire and slogans. And then — like ghosts stepping out of the mist — they came.
Not in boots, but in loafers. Not with tanks, but with terms like ‘emergency,’ ‘reform,’ ‘cleansing.’ The caretaker government — military-backed, technocrat-fronted — slid into power under the sterile banner of salvation. They called it 1/11 — the day politics was put in chains.
We in the Navy watched with a strange mix of relief and dread. Relief because the streets were quiet — finally, no more burning buses, no more bodies charred in barricades. Dread because we knew silence enforced by bayonets is not peace — it is pressure. And pressure bursts.
And so came the purge. The Anti-Corruption Commission — once a bureaucratic skeleton — was given teeth, fangs, and a script. Files were dusted off. Cases multiplied overnight. The word ‘corruption’ became a sword, glinting with accusation, swung not for justice but for humiliation.
Then came the cruelty behind the curtains — the kind that leaves no scars visible to the cameras. Her sons — Tarique Rahman and Arafat Rahman — were dragged through a theatre of torture and humiliation. Tarique’s body would carry the evidence long after his exile; Arafat, frail and broken, would never escape the shadow of those cells. And when her mother lay dying, they denied her the dignity of being at her side. It was punishment beyond politics. It was personal.
The bitterest irony? The men orchestrating this cold ballet were not strangers — they were her own creations. Generals she had lifted, officers her government once patronized, now turned executioners of her undoing. In the military’s long corridors, some of us whispered: ‘This is what happens when politics plays god with the chain of command.’
I remember that day in September 2007 like a photograph etched in steel. Khaleda Zia walked into custody not as a fallen queen but as a defiant widow. Her sari was perfectly pleated, her chin lifted like a flag that refused to bow. Policemen surrounded her but never met her eyes. There was no shouting, no struggle — just a quiet dignity that cut deeper than defiance.
In the courtrooms, ceiling fans whirred lazily over the stench of damp paper and stale fear. The charges were read like ritual incantations: graft, embezzlement, misappropriation. But the real indictment was this: How dare a woman — widow of a martyr, mother of a party — stand against the machine? This wasn’t about money. It was about erasure.
For the Navy, the dilemma deepened. We were told to stay ‘neutral.’ But neutrality in Bangladesh is never clean. There were whispers in the wardroom: ‘Do we salute the constitution or the controllers behind the curtain?’ Some officers argued this was a cleansing fire. Others muttered that the fire would consume the very idea of civilian supremacy. One thing united us all: unease. Because every time the generals in civvies spoke of reform, they sounded like men measuring curtains for a house that wasn’t theirs.
And then came the absurd dream — the Minus Two Formula. Remove Khaleda. Remove Hasina. Build a ‘non-partisan’ democracy. As if Bangladesh could be scrubbed of its scars by decree. They forgot one rule of politics: you can exile a person, but you cannot exile memory.
Months turned into years. Emergency rule hung over the nation like a monsoon cloud that refused to break. Courts became theatres. Verdicts were written before hearings began. The Anti-Corruption Commission became a shadow — its files fat with names, its justice hollow. And all the while, Khaleda endured.
Not absolved. Not vindicated. Not healed. But present. Beside the fire of her own resilience — fragile in body, steel in spirit. She became a paradox: prisoner and matriarch, accused and icon. Her survival itself became defiance — a whispered warning to those who tried to erase her: ‘I am still here.’
By late 2008, the stage cracked. The generals could not govern forever. The diplomats grew restless. The economy bled. And so the script flipped: elections, legitimacy, a hurried exit. Khaleda walked free — not triumphant, but undefeated. The iron silence of 1/11 ended not with victory, but with exhaustion.
Yet the cost was monumental — not just for her, but for the nation. Institutions — once designed to serve freedom — were reduced to stage props. Courts became choreography. Legality became a costume for foreign approval. Democracy became a word, hollow and brittle, worn for visiting diplomats while the people watched in silence.
And through it all, she remained. A survivor. A warning. A woman whose endurance exposed a brutal truth:
In Bangladesh, to outlive power is not just dangerous — it is unforgivable.
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.
