Benazir Bhutto (Pakistani political leader), Daughter Of Destiny....

 Benazir Bhutto,
(1953- ), Pakistani political leader, who served as prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. Bhutto was educated at Radcliffe College in the United States and at the University of Oxford in England, where she was the first Asian woman to be elected president of the Oxford Union. The daughter of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977), she returned to Pakistan in 1977, planning on a career in the foreign service, only days before General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq staged a coup that unseated her father. Following her father’s imprisonment in 1977, Bhutto and her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, assumed the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The ruling military regime placed Bhutto under house arrest and then in prison. Released in 1984, she went into exile in Britain until 1986, when martial law was lifted in Pakistan. Supported by tumultuous crowds, Bhutto again called for fresh elections, resulting in another short prison term that same year. She also had to contend with internal dissension among the anti-Zia forces.

In 1988 Zia was killed in an airplane crash, less than three months after announcing that elections would take place. In the November elections the PPP gained a huge plurality in the National Assembly, and in December 1988 Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan, the first woman to hold this office in any modern Islamic state. In August 1990, however, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her, charging her with incompetence and corruption. Her party was soundly defeated in the elections that followed, and Bhutto became an opposition leader in the parliament. Subsequent attempts to oust the ruling party resulted in Bhutto’s deportation to the city of Karāchi in 1992, and she was temporarily banned from entering Islāmābād, the capital of Pakistan. In October 1993, following the joint resignations of Ishaq Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto was again elected prime minister. However, in 1996 her government was once again dismissed by the president amid allegations of corruption. New elections in 1997 brought only a small number of seats to the PPP, ruining Bhutto’s chances of regaining her former position. Bhutto faced multiple corruption charges, which she denounced as politically motivated, and went into self-imposed exile. In 2001 the Supreme Court of Pakistan suspended a high court’s 1999 conviction of Bhutto, ordering a retrial, but in a separate trial Bhutto was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison. Bhutto faces arrest if she returns to Pakistan. Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, was published in 1988.