Khaleda Zia used a space given to her, but shrank it |
A stateswoman in 20th-century South Asia was invariably dynastic. So was Khaleda Zia, who passed away in the early hours of 30 December But the commonalities between the tallest South Asian stateswomen — Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina, and Khaleda Zia — went much beyond the boundedness of their origins. While they all started off in the shadow of a man, each of them ended up reshaping the country in their own way.
It was the events set off by the massacre of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family that eventually catapulted Hasina and Khaleda into politics. The saga would come full circle with the assassination of President Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda’s husband, after which she would enter politics with a vengeance. Khaleda........