INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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
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
Nationalist party (BNP), and widow of Ziaur Rahman, a military officer and politician who served as president from 1977 until his
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.View image in fullscreenA mural of Sheikh Mujibur
Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty ImagesThe 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
term began to slip from use
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
when it won independence from Pakistan in 1971, today more than 95% of the 170 million population have access to electricity, with per
drove the students in their protests against Hasina and the quota system, which denied many of them government jobs after having had to fund
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
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
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
This article first appeared/also appeared in theguardian.com
