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 Pakistan's first and only female prime minister and 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. 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.