Cut off from party colleagues, family members and the public gaze, three-time Bangladeshi Prime Minister Khaleda Zia spent nearly two years in almost complete isolation inside Dhaka Central Jail — a period that came to symbolise the depths of political rivalry in the country. Her imprisonment, which began in February 2018, was widely viewed as a stark signal of how far the Sheikh Hasina government was prepared to go in its confrontation with its most formidable political opponent.
As thousands gathered in Dhaka on Wednesday to bid her a final farewell, memories resurfaced not only of Khaleda Zia’s long political career but also of the most harrowing chapter of her life. While crowds mourned her passing in public, there was a time when she endured profound solitude, locked away from society for years. That period, marked by silence and confinement, remains one of the most striking episodes in Bangladesh’s political history.
Khaleda Zia passed away on December 30 after a prolonged illness and was laid to rest on Wednesday afternoon near the Bangladesh Parliament complex. India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar attended the funeral and later met her son and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) acting chairman, Tarique Rahman. Speaking ahead of the funeral, BNP leader Nazrul Islam Khan recalled how Zia had entered prison on her own strength but emerged years later with severely deteriorated health, a reflection of the toll her imprisonment had taken.
Her incarceration began on February 8, 2018, when a special court convicted her in the Zia Orphanage Trust case, sentencing her to five years in prison for alleged misuse of funds. Khaleda Zia strongly denied the charges, insisting they were politically motivated and aimed at preventing her from contesting the general elections later that year. At the time, Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League was firmly in power, and the case was widely seen as part of a broader campaign to sideline the opposition.
Later in 2018, another conviction in the Zia Charitable Trust case further increased her sentence, eventually extending it to a total of 17 years. The rulings came amid growing accusations that the government was using the judiciary and law enforcement to neutralise political rivals. The BNP described the prosecutions as acts of vengeance in the long-running rivalry between Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina — a feud that had shaped Bangladeshi politics for decades and came to be known as the era of the “battling begums.”
What made Khaleda Zia’s imprisonment especially striking was not only the sentence itself, but the conditions under which she was held. She was confined alone in the Old Dhaka Central Jail on Nazimuddin Road — a colonial-era prison that had largely been abandoned after inmates were moved to a modern facility in Keraniganj. For more than two years, she was reportedly the only inmate in the sprawling, decaying complex.
Despite being a former prime minister and an elderly woman with multiple health issues, she was not granted “division” status, which would have entitled her to better living conditions. Instead, she remained in a dilapidated cell and was served standard prison food, which doctors later said was unsuitable for her medical condition. BNP leaders repeatedly raised concerns about her health, arguing that her confinement amounted to psychological and physical punishment rather than lawful detention.
The Old Dhaka Central Jail itself carries deep historical weight. Dating back to the Mughal era, it once housed political prisoners during the Language Movement, the Six-Point Movement, and the 1971 Liberation War. For Khaleda Zia to be held there alone, long after it had ceased functioning as a regular prison, added a symbolic layer to her detention.
Isolated from family, denied regular visitors, and cut off from political life, her health steadily worsened. She suffered from diabetes, arthritis and other age-related ailments, with her supporters repeatedly warning that her prolonged confinement was putting her life at risk. For many, her incarceration became a powerful example of how political conflict in Bangladesh had crossed into personal and punitive territory.
It was only in March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread and pressure mounted both domestically and internationally, that the government granted her conditional release. Her sentence was suspended on humanitarian grounds, allowing her to leave prison but confining her to house arrest. She was barred from travelling abroad and prohibited from engaging in political activity, and the suspension had to be renewed periodically.
True legal relief came much later. After mass protests in 2024 led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina and the installation of an interim government under Muhammad Yunus, Khaleda Zia was finally cleared of the charges against her. By then, however, years of isolation and ill health had taken a visible toll.
Khaleda Zia’s life was marked by struggle from the moment she entered politics following the assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, in 1981. Rising from personal tragedy to become one of South Asia’s most powerful women, she also endured one of its harshest political downfalls. Her years of solitary confinement remain a haunting reminder of the cost of political rivalry in Bangladesh — a chapter that shaped both her final years and the country’s turbulent political history.
