Deepali Kalia –
The Bangladesh High Court has sought the birth registration, passport, educational certificate and other relevant documents of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in order to determine her genuine date of birth.
An order was issued on June 13 by a Bench comprising Justice M Enayetur Rahim and Justice Sardar Md Rashed Jahangir after hearing a writ petition filed on May 31 by Md Mamun-or-Rashid, Supreme Court lawyer, which challenged the legality of celebrating the 75-year-old Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chief’s birthday on August 15.
In the petition the lawyer claimed that Zia mentioning her date of birth as August 15, 1946 in her present passport is a matter of great distress for the nation as she has done so with an ulterior motive and malafide intention to malign the National Mourning Day, when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Father of the Nation and most of his family were brutally slaughtered in 1975.
It was further contended by the petitioner that Zia’s birthday is recorded as September 5, 1946 in her SSC certificate; August 4, 1944 in her marriage registration; August 5, 1946 in her machine-readable passport issued in 2001 and May 8, 1946 in her COVID-19 test report released on May 8, 2021.
However, AM Mahbub Uddin Khokon BNP Joint Secretary-General and former Supreme Court Bar Association Secretary opposed the writ petition stating that the petition has been filed for political gain and issues like birthdays are of no concern to the High Court.
Zia is serving 17 years imprisonment and was sent to jail for embezzling foreign donations made to an orphanage named after her slain husband and president Ziaur Rehman, during her premiership between 2001 and 2006.
She was, later in the same year, convicted in another corruption
