Sheikh Hasina: Once Bangladesh’s democracy icon, now its ‘authoritarian’ PM

The 76-year-old wins fourth straight term in controversial election boycotted by opposition and marked by low turnout.

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina once joined her rivals in a fight to restore democracy but her long reign in power has been marked by arrests of opposition leaders, crackdowns on free speech and suppression of dissent.

Hasina, 76, won a fourth straight term and fifth overall in power by sweeping Sunday’s general election, which was boycotted by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) for the second time in the last three polls.

Hasina branded the main opposition party a “terrorist organisation”.

The daughter of the country’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, Hasina was fortunate to have been visiting Europe when most of her family members were assassinated in a military coup in 1975.

Born in 1947 in southwestern Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, Hasina was the eldest of five children. She graduated with a degree in Bengali literature from Dhaka University in 1973 and gained political experience as a go-between for her father and his student followers.