Benazir Bhutto

Who was Benazir Bhutto?

Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani stateswoman who twice served as the Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. Of Sindhi and Kurdish parentage, Bhutto was born in Karachi to the politically significant and aristocratic Bhutto family. She studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she served as President of the Oxford Union. In 1977 she returned to Pakistan during her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's socialist government; shortly afterward, her father was ousted in a military coup and executed. Bhutto and her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, took control of the PPP and led the country's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

Her government was beset with instability, including the assassination of her brother Murtaza, a failed coup d'état in 1995, and a bribery scandal involving her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari; in response, President Farooq Leghari dismissed her government. She was buried at her family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from 1982 until her assassination in 2007. Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Zia-ul-Haq's military government and self-exiled to Britain in 1984. As prime minister, her attempts at reform were stifled by conservative and Islamist forces, including President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the Pakistani military. Her administration, having been accused of corruption and nepotism, was dismissed by Khan in 1990. Intelligence services rigged the following election to ensure a victory for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance (IJI), at which point Bhutto became the Leader of the Opposition.

After Nawaz Sharif's IJI government was also dismissed on corruption charges, Bhutto led the PPP to victory in the 1993 elections. In her second term, she oversaw economic privatisation and attempts to advance women's rights. The PPP lost the 1997 election and in 1998 she went into self-exile again, living between Dubai and London for the next decade. A widening corruption inquiry culminated in a 2003 conviction in a Swiss court. Following the United States–brokered negotiations with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, she returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run in the 2008 elections. Her platform emphasised civilian oversight of the military and opposition to growing Islamist violence. After a political rally in Rawalpindi, she was assassinated. The Salafi jihadist militant group al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, although involvement of the Pakistani Taliban and rogue elements of the intelligence services were also hypothesised. Opinions on Bhutto were deeply divided.

Critics accused her of being politically inexperienced and corrupt, while Islamist and conservative forces opposed her secularist, modernising agenda.

Historical significance

She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. She returned in 1986 and—influenced by Thatcherite economics—transformed the PPP's platform from a socialist to a liberal one, before leading it to victory in the 1988 election, becoming Pakistan's first and only female prime minister. She was nevertheless domestically popular early in her career and was praised as a champion of democracy. Posthumously, she came to be regarded as an icon for women's rights due to her political success in a male-dominated society.