History seldom favors leaders who fail to script their own narratives, and it is uniquely merciless toward women navigating entrenched patriarchal polities. Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who passed away on December 30 remains trapped in that shadow.
She is celebrated—if at all—as a stoic foe of autocracy, a figure of icy resolve, and a disciplined democrat with an unmatched electoral pedigree. What has faded from the collective memory, however, is the substance of her governance.
As a three-time prime minister, Zia was more than a survivor of Bangladesh’s chaotic post-junta transition; she was a primary architect of its modern economic evolution. On her watch, the nation navigated a pivotal shift—transforming from a brittle, agrarian backwater into a competitive, export-led, semi-industrialized state.
When she took power in 1991 following the military’s retreat, Bangladesh was suffocating under systemic deprivation. Over 56% of the population lived in poverty.
By her first term’s end, that rate dipped to 53.1%, pulling roughly five million people from destitution. It was a marginal but significant victory for a young democracy hampered by fragile institutions and a hollowed-out treasury.
Her second tenure, between 2001 and 2006, delivered the definitive breakthrough. Poverty plummeted from 48.9% to 40% in five years—a nine-point collapse.
In visceral terms, nearly 13 million citizens escaped poverty in one term. Across her combined years in power, roughly 18 million Bangladeshis crossed that threshold. This was the result of fundamental structural realignment rather than a byproduct of state largesse.
In a global frame, the achievement is profound. China is lauded for the greatest poverty reduction in history, fueled by export growth and industrial discipline. Bangladesh’s trajectory under Zia mirrored that logic, albeit more quietly.
Prosperity was forged through manufacturing jobs, overseas migration, surging exports and a revitalized rural economy.
Her administrations tethered Bangladesh’s rural heartlands to global labor demands. The garment sector and foreign employment absorbed millions who otherwise faced the stagnation of subsistence.
This was a pragmatic political-economic maneuver—unflashy and devoid of grandiloquent slogans—yet it proved effective. In the unforgiving ledger of history, such a legacy merits far more recognition than it has currently been afforded.
Invoking Robert Frost’s familiar refrain, Khaleda Zia took the road less traveled—then declined to market the trip. She abandoned the slogans and self-congratulation to her rivals.
What remains, discernible only through the lens of hindsight, is the profound impact of that choice in quietly steering Bangladesh’s economy toward firmer ground.
Modernization begins inevitably with exports. Zia inherited a landscape still reeling from the collapse of jute, the commodity that once dictated Bangladesh’s global standing.
Under her direction, ready-made garments emerged as the structural backbone of international integration. During her first term, garment exports nearly tripled, climbing from 51% to 65% of total exports.
Her second term stress-tested that foundation. The global expiration of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement was widely expected to eviscerate Bangladesh’s textile industry. It failed to do so. By 2006, under Zia’s oversight, exports had surged by over 60%, with garments comprising roughly three-quarters of all exports.
The result was a globally competitive manufacturing engine—employing millions, predominantly women, and anchoring industrial capitalism in a nation long dismissed as an agrarian aid case.
The same understated pragmatism governed her approach to labor migration. When she first assumed office, remittances sat at a mere $764 million annually, barely a macroeconomic footnote. By 1996, they reached $1.2 billion.
During her second tenure, they vaulted from $1.9 billion in 2001 to $4.8 billion by 2006—a 150% spike in five years. This was the direct output of deliberate, aggressive labor export policies targeting the Gulf and Southeast Asia.
Remittances evolved into Bangladesh’s informal welfare state, underwriting rural consumption, housing, education and micro-investment. This financial lifeline—which later anchored the economy during bouts of political upheaval—was constructed methodically, years earlier, and without fanfare.
Economic development is defined by structural transformation rather than rhetoric. In 1991, agriculture generated 30% of Bangladesh’s GDP, while industry contributed 21%. By the end of Khaleda Zia’s second term in 2006, the agricultural share had receded to 20% as industry climbed to 27%.
For the first time in the nation’s history, the industrial sector eclipsed agriculture as the primary engine of growth. That transition was materialized because a leader selected the road less traveled—and maintained that course long enough for the economic landscape to shift.
This represented a quiet crossing of a historic threshold: the evolution from a peasant economy into a semi-industrial society. The passage occurred without ceremony or the vocabulary of triumph.
Crucially, industrial growth was not purchased at the cost of hunger. During Zia’s tenure, rice production rose consistently through the proliferation of high-yield varieties, expanded irrigation, and the consolidation of Boro cultivation.
Cropping intensity surged and food security stabilized. Bangladesh advanced toward rice self-sufficiency, dismantling the chronic dependence on food aid that had long underscored its national vulnerability.
That balance—industrial acceleration without agrarian collapse—was reflected in an economy shaped by pragmatic care rather than rigid ideology. Khaleda Zia governed within a hostile landscape, navigating the lingering shadow of military power, donor pressure, and relentless political polarization.
Zia avoided the sterile idiom of technocracy, and her leadership nevertheless laid the essential foundations of Bangladesh’s industrial transition. She presided over the pivotal moment when Bangladesh quietly stepped out of the shadow of famine and onto the uneven, irreversible path of economic transformation. It was not a clean break, nor a completed journey, but it was decisive.
Zia stood on the side of moral truth, refusing to surrender to power. In the face of centralized authority, the silencing of the opposition, and the routine violence of state excess, she emerged as a figure of resistance. Over time, that resistance grew quieter and more symbolic—almost silent—yet it remained sustaining and generative.
Her courage became the seed of the mass uprising of 2024. From that seed, a new Bangladesh is taking shape. On that note, Zia stands not simply as a memory of the past, but as a compass pointed toward hope.
Dr Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir is professor of economics at the Department of Development Studies, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He may be reached by email at rt@du.ac.bd