Sheikh Hasina

Sheikh Hasina (born 28 September 1947) is a Bangladeshi politician who served twice as prime minister of Bangladesh, from 1996 to 2001 and from 2009 until her resignation on 5 August 2024 — the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history and the longest-serving female head of government in the world. A daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, she has been president of the Awami League since 1981. Her second premiership combined major economic and infrastructure development with what the article describes as democratic backsliding and repression, and ended in the July 2024 uprising, after which she left for India; in November 2025 a Bangladeshi tribunal convicted her in absentia of crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death, a verdict she rejected as politically motivated. ^{1 2}

Hasina Sheikh was born on 28 September 1947 at Tungipara in East Bengal, to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Begum Fazilatunnesa Mujib. She grew up between Tungipara and Dhaka, much of her childhood marked by her father's repeated imprisonment as a political prisoner. She married the nuclear physicist M. A. Wazed Miah in 1968; they had two children, Sajeeb and Saima. On 15 August 1975 her father and almost her entire family were assassinated in a military coup; Hasina, her husband and her sister Sheikh Rehana survived because they were visiting Europe. They took asylum in India and lived in New Delhi for six years, barred from returning by the military government of Ziaur Rahman. ¹

While still in exile, Hasina was elected president of the Awami League on 16 February 1981, and she returned to Bangladesh that May. Through the 1980s she was repeatedly detained under martial law while campaigning against the Ershad regime, and in 1990 she and Khaleda Zia of the BNP — her rival in what came to be called the "Battle of the Begums" — jointly led the mass uprising that restored parliamentary democracy. She served as leader of the opposition from 1991 to 1996. ¹

The Awami League won the June 1996 election under a caretaker government, and Hasina became prime minister. Her government signed the thirty-year Ganges water-sharing treaty with India, repealed the Indemnity Act that had shielded her father's killers, opened telecommunications to the private sector, completed the Bangabandhu Bridge, and signed the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord of 1997, for which she received the UNESCO Peace Prize. She returned to opposition after the 2001 election. ¹

Hasina returned to power at the 2008 election and held office for fifteen years. The article credits her government with sustained economic growth and large infrastructure projects, and describes at the same time a transformation of the political system marked by enforced disappearances, human rights abuses, pressure on the press and opposition, and serious allegations of irregularities in the 2014, 2018 and 2024 elections. In July 2024 a student movement against public-service quotas was met with a crackdown in which, the article reports, more than 1,400 protesters were killed; the protests grew into a general uprising, and on 5 August 2024 Hasina resigned and fled to India. ¹

Hasina has remained in India since August 2024. In November 2025 the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka convicted her in absentia of crimes against humanity, including ordering lethal force against protesters, and sentenced her to death; the article records her rejection of the verdict as politically motivated. She remains president of the Awami League. ¹

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