An uncompromising champion of democracy and a moderate face of Islam, Benazir Bhutto’s death in a suicide attack on Thursday, brought a gory end to her volatile political career spanning over two decades.
Pakistan’s first woman prime minister followed her illustrious father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto into politics and both died because of it — he was hanged in 1979 while she fell victim to a suicide attack.
Like the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, the Bhuttos are one of the world’s most famous political families who ruled Pakistan for a number of years without the support of the powerful army.
Elected twice as Pakistan’s premier, she was sworn in for the first time in 1988 but removed from office 20 months later under orders of then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on grounds of alleged corruption.
In 1993, Bhutto was re-elected but was again removed in 1996 on similar charges, this time by President Farooq Ahmed Leghari.
Born in Sindh province on June 21, 1953, and educated in Harvard and Oxford, Benazir walked into politics at the age of 31, albeit a bit reluctantly, in the footsteps of her father and gained credibility from his high profile.
Reflecting a young and glamourous face in a conservative and male-dominated Pakistani society, Benazir represented a refreshing contrast to an array of military rulers who threw all norms of democracy and the rule of law to the wind.
Almost right from the start, Benazir displayed a resilience and determination to take on the military rulers despite heavy odds when she was imprisoned just before her father’s death and spent most of her five-year jail term in solitary confinement.
It was during one of her stints outside the prison for medical treatment that she set up the Pakistan People’s Party in London and began a campaign against the then Pakistani ruler Gen Zia-ul Haq. After Zia died in an air crash in 1988, Benazir became one of the first democratically elected woman Prime Ministers in an Islamic country.
Benazir had succeeded her mother as leader of PPP and the pro-democracy opposition to Zia-ul-Haq regime but she could make her political presence felt only after the death of the military ruler.
On 16 November 1988, in the first open election in more than a decade in Pakistan, Benazir’s PPP won the largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly and she was sworn in as Prime Minister of a coalition government on December 2, at the age of 35—the youngest person and the first woman to head the government of a Muslim-majority state in modern times. Benazir’s government was dismissed in 1990 following charges of corruption, for which she never was tried.
