News Flash
DHAKA, April 15, 2026 (BSS) - Prime Minister and BNP Chairman Tarique Rahman has been featured on the New York-based TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the world for 2026.
The list released today by the TIME magazine included prominent leaders like US President Donald Trump, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Pope Leo XIV, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nepal's Prime Minister Balendra Shah and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, among others.
Tarique Rahman secured the place in the list under the category of "leaders".
The Time Magazine in Tarique Rahman's profile wrote: "Rewind just a few months and Tarique Rahman was living a carefree life of exile in leafy southwest London. But the 2024 ousting of Bangladesh's autocratic Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina propelled the 57-year-old scion from opposition agitator to national leader in waiting-a destiny he fulfilled in February by winning an electoral landslide after 17 years estranged from his homeland".
It was a victory that meant Tarique Rahman had followed in the footsteps of his mother Khaleda Zia, who was Bangladesh's first female Prime Minister and who passed away just five days after his return to Dhaka, it also wrote.
The magazine wrote his grief was still raw when Tarique Rahman sat down with TIME in January, though he vowed to channel it into unifying his country of 175 million, while getting South Asia's second biggest economy buzzing again.
Bangladesh is beset by high inflation and youth unemployment, and relations with regional superpower India have reached a historic nadir, it read, adding, all require swift remedy.
"Corruption allegations from the aughts (albeit since quashed by the courts) may mean any honeymoon period will be shorter than most. But after so many years in the wilderness, he's determined not to waste any more time," the magazine wrote.
"We need to work together, unite," Tarique Rahman told Time, "so that people can have their political rights."
