Benazir Bhutto

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