TARIQUE RAHMAN THE HEIR RETURNS TO AN ANGRY VACUUM

WHEN Tarique Rahman removed his shoes and placed his feet on the ground beside a Dhaka car park on December 25, the gesture carried the weight of unfinished history.

- JAYANTH JACOB

After 17 years in exile, it was a homecoming expressed less through slogans than restraint, a politician reconnecting with a country that had moved on in his absence. Five days later, the death of his mother, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, gave the moment institutional finality. It sealed the transfer of political inheritance and opened a new chapter in the intricate terrain of Bangladesh's politics.

Born on 20 November 1965, Tarique Rahman is the son of two of the most consequential figures in Bangladesh's history-the late President Ziaur Rahman, a decorated freedom fighter and military ruler-turned-politician and former Prime Minister, the late Khaleda Zia, the enduring matriarch of the BNP.

Politics was never distant for him. Yet Rahman's trajectory has been shaped as much by rupture as by inheritance- by exile, repression, and the long shadow of unfinished transitions in Bangladeshi democracy.

Educated at Dhaka's BAF Shaheen College and later at the University of Dhaka, where he studied International Relations, Rahman came of age intellectually amid the collapse of General Ershad's autocratic regime. He immersed himself in political philosophy, from Aristotle to Rousseau, Marx to Locke, and graduated during a period of mass mobilisation led by his mother. Those years might have helped him forged a worldview attentive to the mechanics of power and the fragility of institutions.