Sheikh Hasina, the outgoing Prime Minister of Bangladesh, once symbolized democratic hope for the country by helping to topple the military dictatorship in the 1980s. However, her rule grew progressively authoritarian.
On Monday morning, she resigned and fled to India as thousands of anti-government protesters stormed her official residence.
Since July, the Prime Minister had faced mass protests that began as rallies against public service job quotas and escalated into one of the most severe crises of her 15-year tenure, with opponents demanding her resignation.
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The 76-year-old leader, whose personal history is deeply entwined with the country’s upheavals, won a fifth term in January in a controversial election boycotted by the opposition.
Her critics accuse her government of numerous human rights violations, including the murder of dissidents.
Political Rise
The eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh who led the country to independence from Pakistan in 1971, she was 27 and lived abroad with her sister when her father, mother, and three brothers were assassinated in Dhaka during the first military coup.
She returned from exile to India in 1981 to assume leadership of the Awami League, the party founded by her father, and was often placed under house arrest.
She then joined forces with Khaleda Zia, who became the leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) following the assassination of her husband, Ziaur Rahman, the President of Bangladesh, in another military coup in 1981.
Challenging the military dictatorship of Hossain Mohammad Ershad, the two women and their parties became fierce rivals after democracy was restored in 1991, the year Khaleda Zia was elected.
Sheikh Hasina took over the leadership of the country for the first term in 1996 but was defeated by Khaleda Zia again in 2001.
The two opponents were both imprisoned on “corruption” charges in 2007 during another military-led coup. They were later exonerated, and the following year, Sheikh Hasina won a decisive victory in the general elections.
She was re-elected in 2014, 2019, and 2024.
Under her leadership, Bangladesh, once one of the poorest countries in the world with a population of 170 million, has seen substantial economic growth, notably driven by the expansion of its textile industry.
Since 2009, Bangladesh has recorded an average annual growth rate of over 6% and surpassed India in per capita income in 2021, despite ongoing significant inequalities. Today, around 95% of the population has access to electricity.
At the end of 2023, Sheikh Hasina promised that with a new mandate, she would “turn Bangladesh into a developed and prosperous nation.” However, according to government data, 18 million young Bangladeshis are still unemployed. The international community also praised her leadership in 2017 for opening the country to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fleeing massacres in neighboring Myanmar.
Forced Disappearances
However, her rule has also been marked by increasing authoritarianism. In 2018, Khaleda Zia was sentenced to 17 years in prison on corruption charges. Meanwhile, almost all leaders of the BN -currently the main opposition party-, along with thousands of its supporters, were arrested, and freedom of expression was severely restricted.
Over the past decade, five senior Islamist leaders and an opposition figure have been executed after being convicted of crimes against humanity related to the brutal liberation war of 1971.
Rather than mending the wounds of this conflict, these trials have ignited deadly clashes, with critics denouncing them as a sham intended mainly to silence dissent.
In 2021, the United States imposed sanctions on the RAB, an elite unit of Bangladesh’s law enforcement, due to persistent human rights abuses.
After winning a third consecutive term in the 2024 parliamentary elections, Sheikh Hasina branded the BNP as a “terrorist organization.” The opposition party had again called for an election boycott, continuing a stance first taken in 2019.
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In November, Human Rights Watch reported having evidence of “forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial executions.”
“I have been building this country over the past fifteen years”, Sheikh Hasina told journalists last month.
“I have done everything for these people” she added.
Shafiqul Alam, with AFP
