Zia's Ghost Still Haunts Bangladesh's Fragile Power Pact

The process took a mere 17 days. Armed with charges of mutiny rather than murder, the state deliberately chose to treat a profound political assassination as a mere breach of military discipline.

The tribunal ordered the hanging of 13 military officers in a rushed civilian execution process designed to foreclose deeper investigation. The alleged ringleader, Major-General Muhammad Abul Manzur, a highly“respected” commander who had fought alongside Zia in 1971, never made it to the stand.

Taken into military custody after the coup collapsed, Manzur was shot dead under highly suspicious circumstances inside the Chattogram cantonment, permanently silencing the only man who could have unmasked the wider conspiracy.

A parallel judicial inquiry committee also took testimony, yet its final report was buried by the state and never published.

This“calculated” amnesia set a dark, institutional precedent for Bangladeshi governance. It signaled to the top brass that violent political intervention carried no historical accountability, a realization that Ershad capitalized on just ten months later when he bloodlessly seized the presidency.

The political silence that followed is even more instructive than the rushed executions.

Despite holding power for multiple terms under Zia's widow, Khaleda Zia, the BNP has consistently declined to form an independent commission of inquiry into its founder's death, hiding behind the legal pretext that the 1981 court-martial closed the case permanently.

Critics see a deeper, cross-party consensus at play. For both the BNP and its rivals, a genuine forensic unraveling of the 1981 coup risks exposing the deep, factional rot of an army that spent its early decades acting as a political arbiter.

It was far safer for the political class to canonize Zia as a sanitized, convenient myth for electoral exploitation than to risk shaking the foundations of the garrison.

Yet, Zia's practical legacy has proved far more durable than the state apparatus that failed to protect him. Stepping into the vacuum of the chaotic mid-1970s-following the 1975 assassination of the country's founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-Zia dismantled the suffocating, one-party socialist experiment known as BAKSAL.

In its place, he introduced an early model of market liberalization. He pivoted the economy away from heavy state monopolies, legalized dissolved political entities across the spectrum, and laid the foundations for the three pillars that sustain modern Bangladesh.