Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto was born on June 21, 1953, in Karachi, the first child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his wife Nusrat, an Iranian-Kurdish born socialite who later became a politician in her own right ^[1]. The Bhuttos were wealthy Sindhi landowners with a long record of public service, and her father was already rising through Pakistan's political ranks during her childhood. She grew up in a household where dinner conversation ran to elections, diplomacy, and the fragile institutions of a young state.

Her schooling began at Lady Jennings Nursery School and continued at convent schools in Karachi and Murree. At fifteen she passed her O-level examinations, and in 1969 she left for the United States to study at Radcliffe College, then the women's coordinate college of Harvard University ^[2]. She earned a degree in comparative government in 1973, a period she later described as formative for her belief in democratic politics.

From Harvard she moved to the University of Oxford, where she read philosophy, politics, and economics at Lady Margaret Hall and completed a further course in international law and diplomacy. In 1976 she was elected president of the Oxford Union, the first Asian woman to hold the post, a distinction that made news in Pakistan and marked her out as her father's likely political heir ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Benazir Bhutto before politics finds the answer in these years: a privileged, ambitious student trained in two of the West's most competitive debating cultures.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan in June 1977, intending to enter the foreign service. Within weeks the army chief, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, overthrew her father's elected government in a coup ^[1]. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was arrested, tried on charges of conspiring to murder a political opponent, and hanged on April 4, 1979, despite international appeals for clemency ^[4]. The execution turned his daughter, then twenty-five, into the leading symbol of resistance to military rule.

The years that followed were harsh. Benazir and her mother spent long stretches under house arrest or in prison, including months in solitary confinement at Sukkur jail in conditions that damaged her health ^[2]. In 1984 she was allowed to leave for medical treatment in Britain, and from London she led the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in exile, keeping the organization alive while Zia's regime jailed and flogged its workers.

When martial law was lifted, she flew home. Her arrival in Lahore on April 10, 1986, drew one of the largest crowds in Pakistan's history, with estimates running to a million people lining the route from the airport ^[3]. Two years later Zia died in a still unexplained plane crash, elections were called, and the PPP emerged as the largest party. On December 2, 1988, at the age of thirty-five, Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as prime minister, the first woman ever to head the government of a Muslim-majority nation ^[1].

Any honest account of Benazir Bhutto achievements has to weigh symbolism against results. Her first government, from 1988 to 1990, lifted bans on trade unions and student organizations, freed political prisoners, restored press freedoms curtailed under Zia, and returned Pakistan to the Commonwealth ^[2]. She appointed women judges to the high courts for the first time and established a Ministry for Women's Development. Abroad, she became a celebrated figure, addressing a joint session of the United States Congress in 1989 ^[4].

Governing proved far harder than campaigning. The military and the presidency retained control of foreign policy, the nuclear program, and Afghanistan, leaving her limited room to act. Her administration struggled with ethnic violence in Sindh and a hostile Senate. In August 1990 President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her government under the constitution's Eighth Amendment, citing corruption and incompetence, and the PPP lost the elections that followed ^[1].

She returned to office in October 1993 after Nawaz Sharif's government collapsed. Her second term brought policies with lasting effects: Pakistan began a major expansion of primary schooling, launched the Lady Health Worker Programme that eventually placed tens of thousands of trained women health visitors in rural communities, and pushed electrification and polio immunization drives ^[5]. Yet the same term was marred by allegations of large-scale corruption centering on her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, by a bitter feud with her brother Murtaza that ended with his killing in a Karachi police encounter in 1996, and by her government's early support for the Taliban movement in Afghanistan ^[4]. In November 1996 President Farooq Leghari, once her own ally, dismissed her government as well.

In December 1987 Bhutto married Asif Ali Zardari, a Sindhi businessman from a landowning family, in an arranged match in Karachi ^[2]. The decision surprised some Western observers, but she argued that an arranged marriage was the practical course for a woman leading a political party in Pakistan. The couple had three children: a son, Bilawal, born in 1988, and two daughters, Bakhtawar and Aseefa. She was pregnant with Bilawal during the 1988 election campaign, and in 1990 she became the first head of government in modern times to give birth while in office ^[1].

Zardari's business dealings shadowed her career. He was nicknamed "Mr Ten Percent" by critics and spent a total of roughly eleven years in Pakistani jails on charges ranging from corruption to murder, though he was never convicted of the major counts ^[4]. Swiss prosecutors investigated money-laundering allegations against the couple, and the cases dragged on for years without a final conviction against Bhutto herself.

She wrote two autobiographical works, Daughter of the East (published in the United States as Daughter of Destiny) in 1988, and Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, completed just before her death and published in 2008 ^[6]. Friends described her as devoted to her children, superstitious about dates and omens, and sustained by a conviction that her family carried a special obligation to Pakistan. Both of her brothers died violently: Shahnawaz was found dead in France in 1985 in unexplained circumstances, and Murtaza was shot in 1996 ^[3].

After her second dismissal Bhutto stayed in Pakistan long enough to fight and lose the 1997 election, then left in 1999 for exile in Dubai and London as corruption convictions (later set aside) loomed at home ^[1]. General Pervez Musharraf's coup that October closed the door on an early return. For eight years she lived abroad, lecturing, writing, and holding the PPP together by long-distance telephone and annual party gatherings.

By 2007 Musharraf's position was weakening, and Washington and London quietly encouraged an accommodation between the general and the exiled leader. A National Reconciliation Ordinance, issued in October 2007, withdrew the outstanding corruption cases against her and other politicians, clearing the way for her to come home and contest elections ^[4].

She landed in Karachi on October 18, 2007, to a welcome that recalled 1986. That same night two bombs tore through her procession near Karsaz, killing about 140 people and wounding hundreds more; Bhutto survived because she had just stepped inside her armored truck ^[7]. She refused to withdraw from the campaign, telling interviewers that the militants wanted exactly that. Through November and December she campaigned across the country while warning publicly that elements within the state were failing to protect her.

On December 27, 2007, Bhutto addressed an election rally at Liaquat National Bagh in Rawalpindi, the same park where Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, had been assassinated in 1951. As her vehicle left the grounds she stood up through the roof escape hatch to wave to supporters. An attacker fired at her and then detonated a suicide bomb, killing her and more than twenty others ^[1]. She was taken to Rawalpindi General Hospital and pronounced dead that evening; the hospital was later renamed Benazir Bhutto Hospital in her memory ^[4].

The Musharraf government blamed Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who denied involvement. The circumstances immediately became contested: the exact cause of death (bullet wounds or a skull fracture from the blast) was disputed, the crime scene was hosed down within hours, and no autopsy was performed ^[7]. A United Nations commission of inquiry reported in 2010 that the assassination could have been prevented and that authorities had deliberately failed to investigate it properly ^[8].

Riots swept Sindh in the days after her death, and the elections were postponed to February 2008. The PPP, riding a wave of sympathy, won the most seats. Her nineteen-year-old son Bilawal was named party chairman, with Asif Ali Zardari as co-chairman; Zardari became president of Pakistan later that year ^[4]. In 2017 an anti-terrorism court acquitted five accused militants for lack of evidence, convicted two police officers of mishandling the scene, and declared Musharraf, by then abroad, an absconder ^[7].

Nearly two decades on, readers still search for Benazir Bhutto facts because her story compresses so many of Pakistan's contradictions: dynasty and democracy, feudal wealth and populist rhetoric, real reform and real graft. Her admirers point to the breaking of a barrier no other woman in the Muslim world had crossed, to the health workers and schools of her second term, and to her physical courage in returning home under open threat ^[5]. Her critics answer with the corruption files, the dismissed governments, and the early patronage of the Taliban.

Her influence on women in public life is the least disputed part of any Benazir Bhutto biography. She proved that a woman could win national elections in a conservative Muslim society, and figures from Southeast Asia to the Middle East cited her example. Pakistan later named its main federal cash-transfer scheme for poor women, the Benazir Income Support Programme, after her, and Islamabad's international airport carried her name from 2008 ^[4].

Within Pakistan the Bhutto name remains a live political force. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari led the PPP into subsequent elections and served as foreign minister, consciously invoking his mother and grandfather. Her tomb at the family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, Sindh, beside her father's, draws pilgrims on each anniversary of her death ^[2]. Whether remembered as a martyr for democracy or as a flawed dynast, she remains one of the defining figures of Pakistan's first sixty years.