Sheikh Hasina once helped rescue Bangladesh from military rule, but her long rule came to a sudden end on Monday when protesters stormed her palace in Dhaka.
His 15 consecutive years in power were marked by an economic revival, but also by mass arrests of political opponents and sanctions against his security forces for human rights violations.
The protests began in July with student-led demonstrations against public service employment quotas, but soon escalated into deadly riots and demands for his resignation.
Attacks on protesters by police and pro-government student groups last month also sparked international condemnation.
The autocratic Hasina, 76, won a fifth term as prime minister in January but the opposition boycotted a vote it said was neither free nor fair.
Critics have accused his government of a litany of human rights abuses, including the killing of opposition activists.
The daughter of a revolutionary who led Bangladesh to independence, Hasina presided over breakneck economic growth in a country that American statesman Henry Kissinger once dismissed as an irredeemable “basket case.”
Last year he promised to turn all of Bangladesh into a “prosperous and developed country” but around 18 million young Bangladeshis are out of work, according to government figures.
Economic rise
Hasina was 27 and travelling abroad when renegade military officers assassinated her father, Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, her mother and her three brothers in a coup in 1975.
He returned six years later to take over the reins of his father's Awami League party, beginning a struggle that lasted a decade and included long periods of house arrest.
Hasina joined forces with Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to help overthrow military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad in 1990.
But they soon drifted apart and the resulting rivalry dominated modern Bangladeshi politics.
Hasina first became prime minister in 1996, but lost to Zia five years later.
The couple were jailed on corruption charges in 2007 after a coup by a military-backed government.
The charges were dropped and they stood in the elections the following year, which Hasina won by a landslide and has remained in power ever since.
Zia, 78, is in poor health and confined to a hospital after being sentenced to 17 years in prison for corruption in 2018, while top BNP leaders are also behind bars.
Supporters have praised Hasina for leading Bangladesh through an economic boom, thanks in large part to the largely female factory workforce that powers its garment export industry.
Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries when it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, has grown by an average of more than 6% each year since 2009.
Poverty has plummeted and more than 95% of its 170 million people now have access to electricity, and per capita income surpassed that of India in 2021.
Hasina was also praised for her decisive crackdown on militants in the Muslim-majority nation after five Bangladeshi extremists stormed a Dhaka cafe popular with Western expatriates and killed 22 people in 2016.
Silencing dissent
His government's intolerance of dissent, however, has sparked resentment at home and concern in Washington and elsewhere.
Five senior leaders and one prominent opposition figure have been executed over the past decade after being convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 war.
The trials sparked mass protests and deadly clashes.
Opponents called them a farce and a politically motivated exercise to silence dissent.
In 2021, the United States imposed sanctions on an elite branch of Bangladesh's security forces and seven of its senior officers over allegations of widespread human rights abuses.
Hasina insisted in the face of growing protests that she had worked for her nation and toured areas of Dhaka damaged during days of deadly unrest last month.
“For more than 15 years I have built this country,” he told reporters. “What have I not done for the people?”
