Background and career
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. She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from 1982 until her assassination in 2007. 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). Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Zia-ul-Haq's military government and self-exiled to Britain in 1984. 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. 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. 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. 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. She was buried at her family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. 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. 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.
Bhutto was born at Pinto's Nursing Home on 21 June 1953 in Karachi, Sindh (which constituted the Federal Capital Territory at that time). Her father was the barrister and politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani. The latter was born in Isfahan, Persia (now Iran) to a wealthy merchant family of Kurdish descent. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh, part of the waderos or landed gentry. They were Sunni Muslims, although Nusrat had been born into a Shia Muslim family before converting to Sunnism on her marriage. The couple had married in September 1951, and Benazir was their first child. She was given the name of an aunt who had died young. The Bhuttos' three younger children were Murtaza (born 1954), Sanam (1957), and Shahnawaz (1958). When the elderly Shah Nawaz died in 1957, Zulfikar inherited the family's land holdings, making him extremely wealthy.
Benazir's first language was English; as a child she spoke Urdu less frequently although she was fluent, and barely spoke the local Sindhi language. Her mother taught her some Persian as a child. Benazir initially attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School in Karachi. She was then sent to the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi and from there to the Jesus and Mary Convent, a boarding school in Murree. Murree is near the border with India, and during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 Bhutto and the other pupils underwent air-raid practices. Taking her exams in December 1968, Bhutto passed her O-levels with high grades. Throughout her youth, Bhutto idolised her father, and he, in turn, encouraged her educational development in contravention of traditional approaches to women then pervasive in Pakistan. Relations between her parents were however strained during her childhood; Zulfikar embarked on extra-marital affairs with other women, and when Nusrat objected he had her thrown out of their house. She moved to Iran, but after Zulfikar prevented her children from joining her there, she returned to Pakistan six months later, settling in Karachi. Throughout her life, Bhutto never publicly acknowledged this internal family discord. When Bhutto was five, her father became the cabinet minister for energy, and when she was nine he became the country's foreign minister. From an early age, she was exposed to foreign diplomats and figures who were visiting her father, among them Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger, and Hubert Humphrey. When she was thirteen, he resigned from the government and a year later established his own political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). The PPP used the motto "Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people." It employed a populist strategy to attract votes, promising "roti, kapra aur makan" (bread, clothes, and housing) for every Pakistani and insisting that the disputed territory of Kashmir would be transferred from Indian to Pakistani control. Benazir immediately joined. Amid riots against the government of President Ayub Khan, in 1968 Zulfikar was arrested and imprisoned for three months, during which he wrote to Benazir to encourage her studies.
From 1969 to 1973, Bhutto studied for an undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College. She started when she was sixteen, which was younger than normal, but Zulfikar had pulled strings to allow her premature admittance. Zulfikar asked his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, an economics professor at Harvard who had formerly been a U.S. ambassador to India, to be her local guardian. Through him, Bhutto met his son Peter Galbraith, who became a lifelong friend. Murtaza joined Bhutto at Harvard a year later. Bhutto found it difficult adjusting to life in the United States. A fellow student said she "cried most of her first semester", although Bhutto later called her time at Harvard "four of the happiest years of my life". She became a campus tour guide with the Crimson Key Society and the social secretary of her dormitory, Eliot House. She involved herself in campaigns against American involvement in the Vietnam War, joining a Moratorium Day protest on Boston Common. She encountered activists involved in second wave feminism although was sceptical of some of the views expressed within the movement. At Harvard, Bhutto majored in comparative government and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973. In 1971, while she was at Harvard, Zulfikar invited her to join him in New York City, where he was involved in a United Nations Security Council meeting on that year's Indo-Pakistani War. In December 1971, Zulfikar assumed the presidency of Pakistan, the first democratically elected leader after 13 years of military rule. In 1972, Benazir accompanied her father to the India-Pakistan Summit in Simla as a replacement for her mother, who was ill. There, she was introduced to the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. While in Simla, she attracted much attention from both local and national Indian press, the first time she received such notice. She attributed this to the fact that—in her words—she "symbolised a new generation. I had never been an Indian. I had been born in independent Pakistan. I was free of the complexes and prejudices which had torn Indians and Pakistanis apart in the bloody trauma of partition." In 1974, she flew to Lahore to accompany her father at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's summit. Here, she met a number of the assembled senior Muslim world leaders, who included Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt's Anwar Sadat, Syria's Hafez al-Assad, Saudi Arabia's Faisal, and Jordan's Hussein.
In autumn 1973, Bhutto relocated to the United Kingdom and began studying for a second undergraduate degree, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. After three years, she received a second-class degree. At her father's insistence, she remained in Oxford to study for a one-year postgraduate degree, reading international law and diplomacy; at this point she attended St Catherine's College, Oxford. One of her fellow students at Oxford stated that there, she "epitomised the classic spoilt rich girl from a third world country". She nevertheless made friends, who later described her as a humorous and intellectually curious individual. In 1977, she was elected President of the Oxford Union debating society, the first Asian woman to hold that post. After her three-month term was up, she was succeeded by her close friend, Victoria Schofield. Bhutto was also active in the local Conservative Association and it is through this connection that she is widely believed to have introduced future British Prime Minister, Theresa May, to her future husband Philip May. Despite the ongoing tensions between Pakistan and India, she interacted socially with Indian students, and while at Oxford also made proposals of marriage to two fellow Pakistani students, but was rebuffed on both occasions. Bhutto biographer Brooke Allen thought that her time at Oxford was "almost certainly the happiest, most carefree time of her life". At Oxford, she led a campaign calling for the university to give her father an honorary degree; she gained the support of her father's old tutor, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Bhutto's campaign was opposed by counter-protests, who believed that her father's supposed involvement in the persecution of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and atrocities during the Bangladesh Liberation War made him unsuitable. Ultimately, the university declined to award the honorary degree. In later years, Bhutto acknowledged that at this time she had been ignorant of the Pakistani Army's complicity in the atrocities in Bangladesh, although always maintained that her father was blameless on the issue. After her Oxford education, she returned to Pakistan in June 1977, where she was scheduled to work at the prime minister's office and the "Inter-Provincial Council of Common Interests" during the rest of the summer. Intent on a career in the Pakistani Foreign Service, she was scheduled to take the service's entrance exams later in the year.
In July 1977, Zulfikar Bhutto—who had just been re-elected in a general election—was overthrown in a military coup ("Operation Fair Play") led by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Chief of Army Staff. Both Zulfikar and Benazir believed that Zia's coup had been assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Zulfikar claimed that in a 1975 meeting, U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger had told him that the U.S. would make "a horrible example" of him if he did not terminate Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Now in control of the country, Zia suspended the constitution, and initiated a regime that combined military rule with social programs designed to further the Islamisation of Pakistani society according to Islamic fundamentalist principles. Socialists, intellectuals, and journalists were arrested. Zulfikar, too, was arrested, initially for less than a month. After a crowd of over one million people greeted Zulfikar's release in Karachi and demonstrations were held in support of the ousted president, Zia decided to eliminate him permanently. In September, Zulfikar was re-arrested and charged with the 1974 murder of Muhammad Ahmed Khan Kasuri, the father of Ahmed Raza Kasuri, a vocal critic of Zulfikar's government. After the coup, Bhutto's brothers were sent abroad to canvass international support for their father. Bhutto and her mother remained in Pakistan, although they were repeatedly detained for short periods. When she was able, Bhutto visited her father in prison. She and her mother put out a book about their father and encouraged PPP supporters to demonstrate in support of him. She also assisted in the preparation of his defence case, which was put before first the Lahore High Court, which sentenced him to death, and then the Supreme Court, which upheld that decision. Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark attended the trial, relating that it was a kangaroo court and that Zulfikar did not receive a fair trial. Just before his execution, Zulfikar urged his wife and daughter to leave Pakistan, but they refused. He was executed by hanging in April 1979. Benazir and Nusrat were then imprisoned for six months, before being released and placed under house arrest for a further six months. The two women were only fully released in April 1980. After the coup, Zulfikar had appointed his wife co-chair of the PPP, while in October 1977 Benazir was appointed to the PPP's central committee. After Zulfikar's death, Benazir replaced his role in the party, becoming its co-leader. In February 1981, she formally established the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), a group that brought together the PPP with other political parties in the country: the Pakistan Muslim League, Pakistan Democratic Party, Mazdoor Kisan Party, National Awami Party, Quomi Mahaz-e-Azadi, Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam, and the Tahrik-i-Istiqlal. The MRD called for a four-point program: an end to martial law, the restoration of the 1973 constitution, parliamentary elections, and the transfer of political power from the military to the elected representatives. There was nevertheless much mutual suspicion among the parties in the MRD, with Bhutto having reluctantly allowed groups that firmly opposed her father's government to join. During Zia's regime, Bhutto opposed the Hudud Ordinances, which were a set of laws introduced in 1979 that imposed strict Islamic punishments for crimes such as theft, adultery, and alcohol consumption. She criticized the ordinances for being discriminatory against women and for enabling the misuse of the legal system to target them, particularly in cases of rape and adultery. Bhutto and the Pakistan Peoples Party advocated for reform or repeal of the laws, highlighting the need to protect women's rights and ensure justice. From abroad, her brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, turned to paramilitary action, founding the Al Zulfikar group which trained its members to carry out acts of assassination and sabotage to oust Zia's military government. After Al Zulfikar orchestrated the 1981 Pakistan International Airlines hijacking, the government used this as the pretext for re-arresting Bhutto and her mother in March. Bhutto disapproved of the hijacking, believing that it strengthened Zia's hand; that she was punished for it may have exacerbated tensions with her brothers. In July 1981, Nusrat was released so that she could seek medical treatment for cancer abroad, but Bhutto was not. She was kept for a time in Karachi before being moved to Sukkur prison and then back again to Karachi. During much of this period, she was held in solitary confinement, and experienced a range of health problems, including hair loss, gynaecological issues, and anorexia. In December, she was moved into house arrest, where she would remain for two years. In the United States—a key ally of Zia's regime—Peter Galbraith helped rally support for Bhutto, including from the politicians Claiborne Pell and James Buckley. When Zia visited Washington D.C. in December 1982, they raised the issue of Bhutto's imprisonment with him. As international pressure mounted, the Pakistani government agreed to release her, placing her on a flight to Geneva in January 1984.
