Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto: Biography, Education, Family, Two Terms as Prime Minister, Assassination and Legacy

Who was Benazir Bhutto?

Here is the plain outline. A young woman, educated at the world’s best universities, comes home to work for her father, the Prime Minister. Within weeks he is overthrown by the army. Two years later he is hanged. She is twenty-five.

Over the next decade she is jailed, kept in solitary confinement, held under house arrest and driven into exile. She returns to crowds of a size the country has rarely seen. At thirty-five she is Prime Minister.

She governs twice, is dismissed twice, is accused of corruption, loses two brothers to violent deaths and spends eight more years abroad. She comes home one last time, knowing the danger, and is killed at an election rally.

That is why her name still stirs such strong feeling. To her supporters she is a martyr for democracy. To her critics she is a leader who promised much and delivered little. Both views rest on facts.

Benazir Bhutto’s life had the shape of a tragedy in the old sense: a person of great gifts, born to a great inheritance, brought down by enemies, by circumstances and partly by her own choices.

The Bhutto family

She was born into one of the great landowning families of Sindh.

She was the eldest child. Her father, unusually for his class and time, treated his daughter’s education as seriously as his sons’.

Childhood and school

She grew up in Karachi. English was the language of the house.

• She attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi.
• She was then sent to the convent school of the same order at Murree, a hill station in the north, as a boarder.
• She passed her O-level examinations in December 1968 with high grades.

When she was five her father became a cabinet minister. When she was nine he was foreign minister. In 1967, when she was fourteen, he founded the Pakistan Peoples Party. Politics was the air she breathed.

Harvard and Oxford

She went abroad at sixteen.

Two moments from these years stand out.

In 1972 her father, by then the country’s leader, took her to the summit at Simla in India where he negotiated peace after the war of 1971. She was eighteen and found herself the centre of the Indian press’s attention.

In 1977 she was elected president of the Oxford Union, the university’s famous debating society. She was the first Asian woman to hold the post.

She planned a career in the foreign service. She returned to Pakistan in the summer of 1977 to begin it.

The coup and the gallows

On 5 July 1977, days after her return, the army chief General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew her father’s government.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was arrested, released and arrested again. He was tried for conspiracy to murder a political opponent. The trial has been criticised ever since; in 2024 Pakistan’s Supreme Court itself said that he had not received a fair trial.

He was hanged in Rawalpindi on 4 April 1979.

His wife and his eldest daughter took over the party. For Benazir Bhutto, the next seven years were spent mostly in confinement.

During these years she became co-chair, then sole leader, of the party. She also helped lead the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, the alliance of parties opposed to military rule.

The return, 1986

On 10 April 1986 she flew into Lahore.

The crowd that met her was enormous. Estimates ran from several hundred thousand to more than a million. It took her procession most of the day to cover a few miles. Nothing like it had been seen since her father’s time.

It showed that the PPP’s support had survived nine years of martial law. It also showed that the party’s following was now hers.

Marriage

On 18 December 1987 she married Asif Ali Zardari, the son of a landowning and business family from Sindh. The marriage was arranged by their families. She said she accepted this because an unmarried woman could not lead a political movement in Pakistan without endless gossip.

They had three children: Bilawal (born 1988), Bakhtawar (1990) and Aseefa (1993).

Prime Minister at thirty-five

General Zia died in a plane crash on 17 August 1988. Elections were held that November.

The PPP won the most seats, though not a majority. On 2 December 1988 she was sworn in as Prime Minister. She was thirty-five. No woman had ever been elected to lead the government of a Muslim-majority country.

First government: 1988 to 1990

She took office with her hands tied.

• The President, a former bureaucrat, held the power to dismiss her under a clause General Zia had written into the Constitution.
• The army kept control of defence and of policy on Afghanistan and the nuclear programme.
• Punjab, the largest province, was run by her rival, Nawaz Sharif.

What she did manage:

• She freed political prisoners and lifted bans on trade unions and student unions.
• She eased controls on the press.
• She set up a bank run by women for women, and a ministry for women’s development.
• She signed an agreement with India’s Prime Minister that neither country would attack the other’s nuclear sites.
• Pakistan rejoined the Commonwealth.

What went wrong:

• Ethnic violence in Sindh spiralled.
• Her opponents in Parliament tried to bring her down by a vote of no confidence in 1989. She survived it narrowly.
• Allegations of corruption began to gather around her government and, in particular, around her husband.

On 6 August 1990 the President dismissed her government, citing corruption and failure to keep order. In the election that followed, an alliance of right-wing parties backed by the intelligence services defeated her. Years later the Supreme Court found that intelligence officials had distributed money to her opponents in that campaign.

She gave birth to her second child while in office, in January 1990. She was the first head of government in modern times known to have done so.

Second government: 1993 to 1996

She spent three years as Leader of the Opposition. Then Nawaz Sharif’s government was dismissed in its turn, and in October 1993 she won again.

This time she had a President of her own choosing, a senior member of her party.

What she did:

• Her government launched the Lady Health Worker programme in 1994. It trained tens of thousands of village women to bring basic health care and family planning to rural homes. It is still running and is widely regarded as her most lasting achievement.
• She opened police stations staffed by women and appointed women as judges of the High Courts.
• A new energy policy brought in private power companies to end electricity shortages. It worked for a time. Critics say the contracts were too generous and that the country is still paying for them.
• State companies were sold to private buyers.

What went wrong:

• Karachi descended into near civil war. The government’s crackdown restored order, at the cost of many killings by police that rights groups condemned.
• Her government supported the Taliban as they rose in Afghanistan, a policy she later called a mistake.
• She quarrelled with the Chief Justice over the appointment of judges, and with the President she had installed.
• On 20 September 1996 her brother Murtaza, who had become her political opponent, was shot dead by police near his home in Karachi. She was Prime Minister at the time. Nobody was ever convicted.
• Allegations of corruption multiplied.

On 5 November 1996 the President dismissed her government. In the election of 1997 the PPP was reduced to a handful of seats.

Her two governments compared

The corruption cases

No part of her story is more argued over.

After 1996 her husband was jailed, and stayed in prison for eight years without a conviction that stood. Cases were filed against both of them in Pakistan and abroad. They alleged kickbacks on government contracts and money hidden in foreign accounts.

She denied every charge and said the cases were invented by her enemies. Her opponents say the evidence of unexplained wealth was strong. No conviction against her ever became final.

Exile and the Charter of Democracy

She left Pakistan in the late 1990s and lived for eight years between Dubai and London, raising her children and running the party by telephone.

In October 1999 General Pervez Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif. For the first time, her great rival was also in exile.

In May 2006 the two of them met in London and signed the Charter of Democracy. In it the two largest parties promised never again to conspire with the military against each other, to restore the Constitution to its original form and to respect each other’s mandates.

Much of what the charter promised was later carried out in the constitutional reforms of 2010. Many regard it as her most important political legacy.

The last return

By 2007 General Musharraf was in trouble, and the United States and Britain were pressing him to share power. Talks with her led to a deal: the cases would be withdrawn and she would come home to contest the election.

The assassination

As her vehicle left the park that evening, she stood up through the roof hatch to wave to supporters. A gunman fired at her. A suicide bomber then blew himself up. She was taken to hospital and died within the hour. More than twenty others were killed.

She was fifty-four.

The country erupted. Riots swept Sindh for days. She was buried beside her father at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh.

Who was responsible?

Almost two decades later, no court has established who planned and ordered her murder.

After her death

Her will named her husband to lead the party. He passed the chairmanship to their nineteen-year-old son, Bilawal, and became co-chairman himself.

In the election of February 2008 the PPP won the most seats. Asif Ali Zardari became President of Pakistan that September.

Legacy

What bears her name

• The Benazir Income Support Programme, launched in 2008, pays cash grants to millions of the country’s poorest women. It is the largest welfare scheme in Pakistan’s history.
• Her home district of Nawabshah was renamed Shaheed Benazirabad.
• Universities, hospitals, roads and, for a decade, Islamabad’s airport have carried her name.

What she changed

• She proved a woman could win. A generation of Pakistani girls grew up knowing that the country had been led by a woman.
• She kept the largest party democratic in aim. Under severe provocation she chose elections over armed struggle, unlike her brothers.
• She and her rival ended the 1990s’ cycle. The Charter of Democracy is the reason two elected governments in a row completed their terms after 2008.

What she did not change

• The laws passed under General Zia that most harmed women were still in force when she left office for the second time.
• Corruption and misrule under her governments disillusioned many who had hoped for a new kind of politics.
• The party she left became even more a family concern.

What supporters and critics say

Supporters remember courage above all. She could have lived comfortably abroad. She came back in 1986 and again in 2007, and the second time she was killed. They see a leader who was never allowed to govern freely and was brought down by generals, presidents and judges.

Critics say she had two chances and wasted both. They point to the scandals, to the killings in Karachi, to the support for the Taliban and to how little she did for the poor and for women once in power. Some add that she treated the party as family property.

Historians tend to say that both are right. She was braver than her critics allow and less effective than her admirers remember.

Books by Benazir Bhutto

Words used in this article

Timeline: Benazir Bhutto at a glance

Why her story matters

• She is the reason many Pakistani women believe politics is open to them.
• Her life shows how elected governments were made and unmade in Pakistan’s first sixty years.
• Her unsolved murder remains a test of whether the country can hold the powerful to account.

To understand the system she worked in, read our plain-English guide to Pakistan’s politics and our explainers on the National Assembly and the caretaker government.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Wikipedia, “Benazir Bhutto” — opening summary and early-life section, as last edited on 7 October 2026.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Benazir Bhutto” — standard reference for checking dates.
• United Nations — the report of its Commission of Inquiry into her assassination was published in April 2010; find and link the report itself before publishing.
• BBC News, “Obituary: Benazir Bhutto”
• Benazir Income Support Programme
• Pakistan Peoples Party, official website