Anti-fascist resistance and the struggle against the ‘Oboidho Sarkar’
THE years following Sheikh Hasina’s return to power in 2009 marked not merely a political shift but the construction of an entirely new order. What appeared at first as a democratic mandate soon revealed itself as a project of consolidation — an appropriation of state institutions into the service of dynastic authority. Bureaucracy and the armed forces, traditionally imagined as neutral custodians of statecraft, were reconfigured into partisan instruments. Promotions and postings became less a reflection of merit than of party affiliation or family lineage. Even within the disciplined corridors of the Navy, the undertones of political loyalty became audible: junior officers spoke openly of connections to the ruling family, and households whispered of favours owed and grievances settled. The effect was not incidental — it was structural. Politics seeped into institutions long expected to operate above the fray, and the professional ethos of governance gave way to a culture of dynastic patronage.
In this environment, Khaleda Zia’s presence represented more than opposition politics; it embodied resistance to a creeping leviathan. Her labelling of the Hasina government as Oboidho Sarkar — an unlawful, inert, and dangerously authoritarian regime — was not rhetorical flourish but analytical clarity. To Khaleda, accommodation with illegitimacy was complicity, and compromise was indistinguishable from surrender.
The state’s response was calibrated not through overt coups or sudden violence, but through a slower, colder method of domination. Her residence at Mainul Road, with its symbolic weight as a political inheritance, was seized under the guise of legal technicalities. Later, her very movements were contained not through judicial decree but through barricades of sand-laden trucks and idle brick piles — silent machinery enforcing confinement without due process. The strategy was plain: to erode her stature not by a decisive blow, but by steady marginalisation, public humiliation, and symbolic erasure.
The campaign extended into the courts, where the Anti-Corruption Commission became a stage for prolonged trials that functioned less as mechanisms of justice and more as theatre. Her eldest son, Tarique Rahman, was pursued relentlessly into exile, marked by allegations and torture. Her younger son, Arafat Rahman, died far from home, in lonely exile. And while her mother had passed earlier under the caretaker government, the years of Hasina’s regime denied Khaleda the space to grieve without surveillance. Illness, too, was transformed into a site of political bargaining. Access to medical care — normally a private and humane necessity — was rationed, delayed, and weaponized, turning her physical vulnerability into a lever of control.
Here the gendered dimensions of power are unmistakable. Khaleda Zia’s disciplining was not merely political but also patriarchal. In a political culture where women’s leadership was historically tolerated only insofar as it perpetuated dynastic continuity, her refusal to submit rendered her an anomaly. Her body, her widowhood, her health — all became sites of regulation. She was not only silenced as an opponent but disciplined as a woman who defied her ‘place’ within a male-dominated and dynastically policed order.
Resistance, however, endured. The election of January 5, 2014 — boycotted by the BNP and uncontested in over half of the constituencies — was a watershed. Khaleda’s rejection of its legitimacy, and her call for nationwide blockades and hartals, was costly. Tear gas, rubber bullets, and the deaths of ordinary citizens scarred the movement. Yet her persistence reintroduced a grammar of resistance, reminding a fearful public that legitimacy could not be conjured by decree, and that silence in the face of coercion was itself a form of complicity.
Her legacy, therefore, cannot be reduced merely to the tangible policies of her tenure — such as the expansion of girls’ education, liberalised trade, or tentative steps towards decentralisation. Important though these were, they have long been eclipsed by the state’s narrative of corruption and incompetence. What remains more enduring is her capacity to endure: to survive the ‘minus-two’ formula of the generals, to withstand trials designed to humiliate, to remain a political presence despite the exile and loss of her sons, despite illness, despite confinement.
For the generation that rose during the Monsoon Movement of 2024, Khaleda Zia’s physical absence mattered less than the symbolic persistence of her defiance. The barricades that enclosed her, the courts that staged her humiliation, and the hospitals that rationed her care — all became emblematic of what it meant to resist a state addicted to domination. Her survival, even in constrained form, offered a quiet but powerful lesson: that authority is not the natural right of dynasties, armies or juntas, but must remain accountable to the people.
In reflection, Khaleda Zia’s political life functions as both testimony and indictment. It testifies to the possibility of female leadership that refuses the scripts written for it by patriarchy, widowhood or dynastic inheritance. It indicts a political culture that preferred to weaponize her vulnerability rather than contest her leadership in open democratic competition. To endure such a siege was, in itself, an emancipatory act — naming authoritarian impunity, patriarchal silencing, and dynastic arrogance for what they were: domination masquerading as governance.
Through this long arc of repression and defiance, Khaleda Zia did not fade into victimhood. She remained a stubborn force of resistance — a reminder that leadership is not conferred by inheritance or decree, but earned in the crucible of struggle. Her legacy, whether admired or maligned, rests in this: resilience as political defiance, and endurance as the final verdict against a state that sought to erase her.
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Leadership forged in fire: the mechanics of power
KHALEDA Zia’s rise was not conventional; it was a consequence of circumstance. The assassination of Ziaur Rahman left a vacuum she stepped into reluctantly but decisively. Her entrance into politics challenged entrenched patriarchal and militarised hierarchies, and she became a direct test of Bangladesh’s tolerance for female leadership.
The resistance she faced during General Ershad’s rule in the 1980s revealed how power structures sought to control both politics and perception. Arrests, confinement and public ridicule framed her as an incapable housewife — a deliberate attempt to marginalise her and warn others away from challenging male-dominated authority. Her very survival under such conditions was a statement: a refusal to be erased, an assertion that women could claim space in the public and political arena.
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The architecture of subjugation
WHAT unfolded against her was never mere political competition; it was a ritual of control, a slow-motion choreography of subjugation. The sand-filled trucks stationed outside her gates were not barriers alone but towering symbols of a state’s will to bury dissent beneath its weight. They stood as mute warnings: a woman in power must remember she is tolerated, never free; she may be seen, but only as an ornament to the order, never as its challenger.
In such a landscape, law ceases to protect. It mutates into weapon. Court summons became chains, verdicts became cudgels, and procedure became the stage upon which punishment masqueraded as justice. Permission to mourn was rationed, as if grief itself required state approval. When her younger son Arafat’s coffin returned from exile, the silence that greeted her sorrow was not indifference but calculated cruelty — a reminder that even death could be conscripted into politics. And the bruises carried by Tarique, etched into his body by torture, told a story the judiciary refused to hear, as though his pain had no standing in the realm of justice.
Her own illness was transformed into leverage. Access to treatment was not delayed by inefficiency but by intent, as though the rhythm of her heart and lungs were controlled by the signatures of bureaucrats. Survival was reduced to a privilege bestowed at the mercy of her adversaries. She was not regarded as a patient, nor even as a citizen, but as a living demonstration of the state’s capacity for cruelty — a reminder that the machinery of power extended even into the fragile tissues of her body.
But her ordeal was not isolated. It echoed with familiarity across the globe: in the courtrooms where dissidents in Moscow are condemned by scripted trials, in Delhi where legal codes bend to suffocate opponents, in capitals where authoritarianism dresses itself in the robes of democracy. Her resistance was not simply personal but emblematic of a wider refusal — the refusal to accept domination as destiny, or silence as inevitability.
The losses she endured were intimate and devastating: a mother’s passing without the comfort of her embrace, a son returned not in life but in death, another son haunted by scars that the world pretended not to see. She lived surrounded by absences, by ghosts — ghosts of family, ghosts of justice, ghosts of a democracy hollowed out by those who claimed to defend it.
And yet, she endured. Fragile, yes, but never erased. Her very survival posed a question her tormentors could not answer: How do you extinguish someone who refuses to be erased? How do you disappear a woman who insists, simply by remaining, that she has not disappeared at all?
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Institutional paradoxes and media complicity
KHALEDA Zia’s struggle cannot be understood solely as the story of an individual confronting political rivals; it is inseparable from the structural pathologies of the Bangladeshi state. While she resisted the authoritarian tendencies she labelled ‘Oboidho Sarkar,’ she simultaneously contended with institutions that had long been hollowed by partisanship and coercion. Parliamentary debates often functioned as theatre, judicial processes were frequently subordinated to political expediency, and the infamous ‘minus-two’ strategy — conceived in military corridors — revealed the chilling efficiency with which power could be concentrated by undermining formal democratic mechanisms. Corruption was invoked not as a principle but as a pretext, while state institutions were repurposed to legitimise the removal of political actors inconvenient to those in control.
The media, ostensibly an independent pillar of democracy, largely failed to serve its function as a check on authority. Many outlets amplified smears rather than interrogating the mechanisms of power, participating in a broader system of structural intimidation. Yet Khaleda Zia did not follow the predictable path of authoritarian countermeasures. She did not shutter newsrooms or silence dissenting voices; her response was measured, principled and ethical. This choice highlighted not only her personal integrity but the deeper fragility of democratic institutions in Bangladesh, which continue to operate under selective enforcement and systemic manipulation.
The press, as much as any formal institution, became a contested arena of control. Syndicates and networks wielded language as a tool of power, shaping public perception and reinforcing hierarchical domination. Khaleda Zia absorbed these assaults with quiet persistence, maintaining her principles even as the machinery of misinformation sought to erode her legitimacy. Her restraint was an implicit critique: that ethical governance need not replicate the coercion of its adversaries, that strength may coexist with integrity, and that resistance to systemic oppression is possible without descending into the same methods as the oppressors.
The broader question her life exposes is not merely about her own survival but about the systemic contradictions of Bangladeshi democracy. Can a state that weaponizes law, media, and institutional authority in the pursuit of political ends truly claim legitimacy? Her story is a mirror held to the nation, revealing a society in which freedom is conditional, justice is provisional and political power is inseparable from coercive apparatuses. Khaleda Zia’s endurance, therefore, is not simply personal — it is a confrontation with the structural inequities and institutional failures that define the very limits of accountability and democracy in Bangladesh.
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Endurance as resistance
KHALEDA Zia’s political life cannot be filed away in the neat little box of ‘success’ or ‘failure.’ It is a shattered mirror of a nation’s soul, reflecting its deepest contradictions: a democracy that is not a house built on principle but a battlefield for dynasties. A place where power is not earned but inherited or, more often, seized in the dead of night. Where the legal instruments of the state — the courts, the police, the commissions — are not tools of justice but of retribution, polished and sharpened for the next turn of the knife.
Her survival is not merely a testament to a person’s resilience. It is a form of resistance in itself, a persistence so stubborn it becomes a political act. It is a quiet refusal to be erased by the very system designed to swallow her whole. The hardships she has endured are not just personal tragedies. Every hardship is a scar on the body politic of Bangladesh. Every insult, a stain on its conscience. Every cage she refused became a living testament to a courage that cannot be broken.
She sits today, wounded but unbowed, beside the fire of her trials. The fire that was meant to consume her has, instead, forged her into something more than a politician. She has become a symbol—a testament to the audacity of a woman who was supposed to be silent, to vanish, to kneel. And in that audacity, Bangladesh is forced to see itself. It sees its scars, its wounds, but also the small, flickering light of hope that refuses to be extinguished.
In a land marked by coups and vendettas, where a person’s name is either a banner of loyalty or a word of treason, to endure is to resist. To persist is to lead. To simply live, to continue to breathe and exist in the face of a system bent on your annihilation, is the most eloquent and revolutionary declaration of freedom a human being can make. It is the victory of a single, unyielding conscience against the cold, grinding machinery of the state.
Concluded.
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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.
