Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s first female prime minister and a two-time head of government, passed away on Dec. 30, 2025. The widow of President Ziaur Rahman and among the earliest Muslim women to lead a modern state, she was never merely a party figure in Bangladesh’s political imagination. Her funeral, attended by several million people, was likely the largest public gathering the country has witnessed in recent decades.

The scale of the crowd has unsettled many easy explanations. Millions gathered without party mobilization, without slogans and without the familiar choreography of Bangladeshi street politics. This was not a demonstration of organizational strength by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), nor a sudden revival of electoral enthusiasm. It was something quieter and politically more revealing.

The turnout forces a harder question: Why did a leader who had been out of power since 2006, politically

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