Benazir Bhutto (Urdu: بينظير بھٹو; 21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was the 11th and 13th Prime Minister of Pakistan, serving two non-consecutive terms in 1988–90 and then 1993–96. A scion of the politically powerful Bhutto family, she was the eldest daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister who founded the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). She was the first woman democratically elected as head of a majority Islamic nation.[1]
In 1982 Bhutto became the chairperson of the PPP, making her the first woman in Pakistan to head a major political party. In 1988, she also became the first woman elected head of an Islamic state's government, and she remains Pakistan's only female prime minister. Noted for charismatic authority[2] and political astuteness, Bhutto drove economic and national security initiatives, and implemented capitalist policies for industrial development and growth. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, denationalisation of state-owned corporations, and the withdrawal of subsidies to others[who?]. Bhutto's popularity waned amid recession, corruption allegations and high unemployment. Eventually conservative President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her government.
Bhutto was elected for a second term in the 1993 parliamentary elections. She survived an attempted coup d'état in 1995. Her hard line against the trade unions and tough rhetorical opposition to her domestic political rivals and to neighbouring India earned her the nickname "Iron Lady";[3] she was also respectfully referred to as "BB".[citation needed] In 1996 more charges of corruption led to the another dismissal of her government by President Farooq Leghari. Bhutto conceded her defeat in the 1997 Parliamentary elections and went into exile in Dubai in 1998. Nine years later, in 2007, she reached an understanding with President Pervez Musharraf, and returned to Pakistan. He granted her amnesty and withdrew all corruption charges against her.
Bhutto was assassinated in a bombing on 27 December 2007, after leaving a PPP rally in Rawalpindi two weeks before the scheduled 2008 general election. She was the leading candidate, and projected winner. She is buried next to her father in the Garhi Khuda Baksh, the Bhutto family graveyard. Her party won the election and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, served as President of Pakistan from 2008–13.
Her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari presently leads the PPP, which as of 2013 was currently in the Pakistani political opposition.
Contents [hide]
1 Early life, 1953–77
2 Marriage
3 Zia's Pakistan, 1977–88
3.1 Zulfikar's assassination and Benazir's arrests
3.2 Release and self-imposed exile
4 First term as Prime Minister, 1988–90
4.1 Relations with India and Afghanistan war
4.2 Science policy
4.3 Nuclear weapons programme
4.4 Space programme
4.5 1989 military scandal
4.6 Dismissal
5 First term as leader of the opposition, 1990–93
6 Second term as Prime Minister, 1993–96
6.1 Domestic affairs
6.2 Women's issues
6.3 Economic issues
6.3.1 Privatization and era of stagflation
6.4 Foreign policy
6.5 Relations with military
6.6 Policy on Taliban
6.7 Coup d'état attempt
6.8 Death of younger brother
6.9 Second dismissal
7 Second term as leader of the opposition, 1996–99
8 Charges of corruption
8.1 Panama Papers
9 Early 2000s in exile
10 2002 election
11 Return to Pakistan
11.1 Possible deal with the Musharraf government
11.2 Return to Pakistan and the assassination attempt
11.3 2007 state of emergency and response
11.4 Preparation for 2008 elections
12 Assassination
13 Controversies
13.1 Atomic proliferation with North Korea
13.2 Position on 1998 tests
14 Legacy
15 Eponymous entities
16 Literary work
17 Footnotes
18 References
19 Bibliography
19.1 Other related publications
20 External links
Early life, 1953–77[edit]
See also: Bhutto family
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, was Prime Minister of Pakistan and founding chairman of the PPP.
Benazir Bhutto was born at Karachi's Pinto Hospital on 21 June 1953.[4] She was the eldest child of Sindhi Rajput Zulfikar Ali Bhutto[5][6][7] and Begum Nusrat Ispahani, of Iranian Kurdish descent.[8][9][10] She had three younger siblings—Murtaza, Shahnawaz and Sanam. According to Benazir, her mother's Kurdish culture played a big role in Bhutto becoming Prime Minister.[8]
Bhutto grew up speaking both English and Urdu, with English her first language. While she spoke fluent Urdu, it was often colloquial rather than formal. In her autobiography 'Daughter of the East', Bhutto also makes reference to using Sindhi, joking about misunderstanding the "Mohenjo-daro"[clarification needed]. According to various interviews given by former household servants, she and her father would speak to them in their native Sindhi.
She attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi.[11] After two years at the Rawalpindi Presentation Convent, she was sent to the Jesus and Mary Convent at Murree. She passed her O-level examinations at 15.[12] She then completed her A-Levels at the Karachi Grammar School.
She pursued her higher education in the United States; from 1969 to 1973 she attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University, where she obtained a BA with cum laude honours in comparative government.[13] She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.[12] Bhutto later called her time at Harvard "four of the happiest years of my life" and said it formed "the very basis of her belief in democracy". In 1995, as Prime Minister, she arranged a gift from the Pakistani government to Harvard Law School.[14]
Between 1973 and 1977 Bhutto studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (LMH) and took additional courses in International Law and Diplomacy.[15] After LMH she attended St Catherine's College, Oxford.[16] In December 1976 Bhutto was elected president of the Oxford Union, and became the first Asian woman to head the prestigious debating society.[12] Her undergraduate career was dogged by controversy, partly due to her father's unpopularity with student politicians.[17] She was also president of the Oxford Majlis Asian Society.[18]
Marriage[edit]
Main article: Zardari family
On 18 December 1987, Bhutto married Asif Ali Zardari in Karachi. The couple had three children: two daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa, and a son, Bilawal. When she gave birth to Bakhtawar in 1990, she became the first modern head of government to give birth while in office.[19]
Zia's Pakistan, 1977–88[edit]
Zulfikar's assassination and Benazir's arrests[edit]
Bhutto's father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was removed from office in a 1977 military coup led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Chief of Army Staff. Zia imposed martial law and promised to hold elections within three months. But instead Zia charged Zulfikar with conspiring to murder the father of dissident politician Ahmed Raza Kasuri. Zulfikar's family opposed Zia's imposition of ultra-conservative military dictatorship, despite the consequences to themselves drawn by their opposition. Benazir Bhutto and her brother Murtaza spent the next eighteen months in and out of house arrest while she worked to rally political support and attempted to pressure Zia to drop the murder charges against her father.
On behalf of Bhutto's former law minister Abdul Hafeez Pirzada and Fakhruddin Abrahim, the Bhutto family filed a petition at the Chief Martial Law Administrator Office asking reconsideration of Zulfikar Bhutto's sentence as well as the release of his friend Mubashir Hassan. General Zia said he misplaced the petition. Although the murder accusation remained "widely doubted by the public", and many foreign leaders appealed for clemency, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was condemned, then hanged 4 April 1979 under the effective orders of Supreme Court of Pakistan.[20] Bhutto and her immediate family were held in a "police camp" until May 1979.[21]
Benazir and Murtaza were arrested[when?]. After a PPP victory in local elections, General Zia postponed national elections indefinitely and moved Benazir, Murtaza, and their mother Nusrat from Karachi to Larkana Central Jail. This was the seventh time Nusrat and her children had been arrested in the two years since the coup. After repeatedly placing the family under house arrest, in March 1981 the régime finally imprisoned Benazir in solitary confinement in a desert cell at Sukkur in Sindh. Every so often, a bottle of poison would appear in her cell.[22] In her autobiography,Daughter of Destiny, she described conditions in her wall-less cage in that prison:
The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies. Grasshoppers, mosquitoes, stinging flies, bees and bugs came up through the cracks in the floor and through the open bars from the courtyard. Big black ants, cockroaches, seething clumps of little red ants and spiders. I tried pulling the sheet over my head at night to hide from their bites, pushing it back when it got too hot to breathe
After six months of this Bhutto spent months in the hospital, then was moved to Karachi Central Jail, where she remained until 11 December 1981. She was then placed under house arrest in Larkana for eleven months, and transferred to Karachi where she spent 14 more months under house arrest.
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