One afternoon at Wadham, there was a commotion outside my room as Benazir - "Pinky Bhutto" to her friends - stormed up the stairs to shout at me, “How dare you block my father’s honorary degree.” I told her to mind her manners and slammed the door in her face. Bakhtawar recreated her father's wedding ring for her fiancé | Photo Credit: Instagram, Benazir’s daughter Bakhtawar Bhutto gets engaged to Mahmood Chaudhary – See pics of extravagant ceremony, Which Sectors Will Revive Due To Vaccine? So for the first time I realize you don’t have to be prime minister to dominate the debate, so I thought it’s better for me to concentrate on the party and build the party as an institution. I felt my voice counted. Bakhtawar is getting engaged to Mahmood Choudhry on November 27. Bhutto was rushed to the hospital but soon succumbed to injuries suffered in the attack. Again very ambiguous, because I don’t want them to go through what I went through. In the span of 15 years, however, Murtaza managed to gain considerable notoriety for a brand of politics that has moved in a direction that was diametrically opposed to Benazir's. Material, physical, everything. Under Bhutto, no one emerged from within its ranks who could be a future leader. The second thing was the love of ordinary people. Benazir Bhutto: I was a good student. She has committed heresy!”. Her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was a barrister and great politician of Pakistan, who served as … You’ve had to deal with family tragedy, you’ve been in and out of prison, in and out of detention. I adopted a very aggressive stance. Only two years into her first term, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed Bhutto from office. As you say, you led a life of privilege amidst great poverty. She was the first woman in modern times to head the government of an Islamic state, and she followed her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who served as prime minister from 1971 to 1977. What are your hopes for Pakistan and the world? In the process, she was subjected to repeated detentions, intimidation, coercion as well as physical and mental hardships to abandon her struggle. I think that as nation states begin to become weaker because of the force of globalization, there will be a greater reversion to ethnicity and to religious violence. Benazir Bhutto was the eldest daughter of Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Nusrat Bhutto. Then of course, we had Fatima Jinna, who was also a presidential candidate — unsuccessful but a presidential candidate. And I remember the parrot fluttering and I can’t bear to see blood to this day or killing. How much can you do, and how much are you losing? | India Development Debate, CM Mamata Banerjee vows to contest from Suvendu Adhikari's constituency I The Newshour Agenda, Protesting farmers prep for a mega tractor rally, but SC reiterates? You can’t even think about politics without having a law degree or a medicine degree or engineering, some degree.” So I temper their enthusiasm. Benazir Bhutto: I was the eldest, and I had a great sense of responsibility. You ran to improve the position of women, social services, education, health. At 35, she was one of the youngest chief executives in the world, and the first woman to serve as prime minister in an Islamic country. Bakhtawar took to … I remember once we came to England. I look back also to little things. Bhutto was born at the Pinto's Nursing Home on 21 June 1953 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. The love was so much that it was enriching. Bhutto’s husband was imprisoned, and once again, she was forced to leave her homeland. And people tell me, “Why are you still idealistic and optimistic?” And I say, “Because there could be ten people who are bad, but there are 90 people who are good.”, You do have to be practical, so there are times when you make compromises, not because you want to, but that’s how the political mathematics plays out. Benazir Bhutto: My father was always championing the cause of the poor. Benazir Bhutto was born June 21, 1953, in Karachi, SE Pakistan, the eldest child of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The post has now received over 26,800 likes and hundreds of comments. It was a very strange world of divisions, and it liberated women. Later that year she returned to Pakistan, where her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been elected Prime Minister, but days after her arrival, the military seized power and her father was imprisoned. I thought all I have to do is win an election and all my critics will disappear and according to Barbara Cartland we’ll live happily ever after. So I was very much into saving the world. I think power for itself is useless. Benazir Bhutto was born into one of South Asia's great political dynasties, Pakistan's equivalent of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty in India.Her father was president of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973, and Prime Minister from 1973 to 1977; his father, in turn, was prime minister of a princely state before independence and the Partition of India. In the wake of her death, rioting erupted throughout the country. They cut everything — took everything away. I was fascinated with literature. Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari is no ordinary Pakistani citizen. The world is changing, and I think that in the new global century you can have a career without being in government. It’s not easy because the other side has to respond too. Following the ceremony, Bakhtawar shared a picture of herself and her fiance Mahmood Choudhry, along with a portrait of her late mother Benazir Bhutto in the background. Could they succeed? But my mother got sick and actually she had lung cancer, but we didn’t know she was getting Alzheimer’s. It was all about reaching out. My experience has made me a more inclusive person, not inclusive to the margins, but inclusive to those people who have differences with us but who are still moderates, so I tried to be more inclusive. I would certainly work towards it if life and fate and my people gave me that opportunity. How did this influence you? It sounds silly to say that I should feel so strongly about a bird, but I remember my father telling me when he was facing the death sentence that “I remember the little girl who cried so much because a bird died, how she must feel.” So for me, human life is very, very sacred. Power is such a strange phenomenon that one gets isolated from the real world. But we’d sit there having these intense conversations about women succeeding. As a child I just assumed this is what fathers did, and when I finished university he was in prison. So really one becomes a prisoner. Benazir’s mausoleum, where she was buried next to her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was seen teeming with PPP supporters. Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who chaired the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), a centre-left political party in Pakistan. But it was terrible for my siblings because they were always being compared by the teachers to me and they would revolt against it, because I’d have a neat handwriting. Benazir Bhutto: I think the most profound influence in my formative years was the years I spent at Harvard. I remember that I used to sit at the head of the table because I was the eldest child. Not personally but on the level that, “These things happen.” It wasn’t like, “We are here to change it.” It was like, “This is how business is done.” In retrospect, I think that I would have done many, many, many things differently. Initially targeting the opposition leader Abdul Wali Khan and his National Awami Party(NAP), a democratic socialist party, the socialist and communist mass who gathered under Bhutto's leadership began to disintegrate, thus dividing and allying with secular fronts. Paid Attribute: Benazir Bhutto was paid the attribute on the tomb which was built in the native area Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, it is the southern province of Sindh.She was buried with her father’s grave which was the leading and famous politician. I read mostly about people who were achievers. And there was a lot of hue and cry against the population program, but we did it by recruiting 50,000 women from different villages, and training them in three-month installments. After a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, a gunman fired at her car before detonating a bomb, killing himself and more than 20 bystanders. Even my own husband, when he married me, he thought I was under delusions that I could beat a military dictator, and he thought that, “When she wakes up and finds out that it’s all wrong and she can’t, then I’ll be there to console her.” Little knowing that I was the one who had to console him when I won. You’ve got a team and you’ve got the experience and you’ve got a program, so we need you.”. I went there at a time of great social ferment, at a time when the Vietnam war was being fought. There’s a price you pay for change. Now everybody drinks Coke, but in those days it was difficult to get a Coke, and that was his wish. And he said, “Take my cow because I don’t have any money,” and that was the cow that would give them milk to feed the children. Begum Nusrat Bhutto (Kurdish: نوسرهت بوتو ; Sindhi: نصرت ڀٽو ; Urdu: نُصرت بُھٹّو ; born as Nusrat Ispahani; 23 March 1929 – 23 October 2011) was an Pakistan public figure of Iranian-Kurdish origin, who served as spouse of the Prime Minister of Pakistan between 1971 until the 1977 coup, and as a senior member of the federal cabinet between 1988 and 1990. Sometimes I think, “Why would someone go on doing it?” When I get so much love at the mass level, I feel that I must go on. She returned to lead a pro-democracy movement, and when free elections were finally held in Pakistan in 1988, Benazir Bhutto herself became Prime Minister. I used to meet my party people, I used to meet poor people in the villages, and they were all very happy because we were doing poverty alleviation and so on. It was when I was in prison and everyone was cut off from me, my family, my friends, food, even couldn’t get a glass of water without having to beg somebody for it who came twice a day with my food, and no ice. BSF detects underground tunnel in J&K's Kathua; Is Pakistan trying to infiltrate India. Although she was herself a devout Muslim, her reforms frequently brought her into conflict with the same religious fundamentalists who had opposed the election of a woman as prime minister. How did the years at Harvard affect you or influence you? 'When he talked it would be like poetry. She should be assassinated! It was an era when people used to go shooting and hunting. Did you have any doubts about what a woman could accomplish in a Muslim country? And the first time — you know, you’re spoiled as prime minister, you have your own planes to go and everything like that, you don’t catch passenger planes or go through immigration — you know, security checks. Close by sat Mazhar Ali Khan, father of famous Pakistani writer Tariq Ali, plus a host of other VIPs and friends. I remember him coming back and saying that a man came and said, “I don’t have any money to pay you for this case.” Some other case he’d been involved in. Mrs. Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka had been the first woman prime minister. How do you succeed? Benazir Bhutto: Yes. Benazir Bhutto’s father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was the leader of Pakistan from 1971 until 1977, when he was overthrown by the military. On the eve of Benazir’s graduation, her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then prime minister, wrote to her that the ‘raw and ruthless life outside the gates of university awaits you’. When there were these demands, I did make an information act, but didn’t follow it through, so I wish I had given more freedom of information. Pakistan's first woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was a trailblazer who faced many trials and tribulations in her political career. Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan (1988–1990; 1993–1996) and then-leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, had been campaigning ahead of elections scheduled for January 2008. I had experience in Pakistan and in America, and I had seen it succeed. There were two moments, let us say, when it happened. Not to compromise the core of my values, but I seek the middle way and I tried do that. Nobody could do it, but he sliced it. I’m not a fundamentalist but I am very devout, and I believe that God places a burden on one’s shoulders that he feels that you can bear. My father was so important to me, and he thought a woman could succeed. So I also tried to be very aggressive and warmongering in my second term to try and co-opt my opposition. In 1984 she was allowed to travel back to the United Kingdom, where she immediately took over as head of the PPP, replacing her mother, and began agitating for democratic reform. She should be killed! Mir Murtaza died when his bodyguard became involved in a gunfight with police in Karachi. It’s a balancing. I remember once coming out on the veranda in our home in the countryside — and my father was teaching my brother to shoot a parrot and… I remember seeing the parrot fall down dead and bleed, and I remember being appalled by it. And he’d take us — we were landowners, large landowners — and he would take us to the lands and he would tell me, “Look at the way these people sweat in the heat and in the sun in the fields, and it is because of their sweat that you will have the opportunity to be educated, and you have a debt to these people, because they weren’t born to sweat like this. So I went back really at the right time. Your father was an important influence in your life? Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in 1988. It’s a strange thing to say today, but in those days people thought that it was indecent for a woman to work and “good women” (in inverted commas) didn’t work. On the eve of Benazir’s graduation, her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then prime minister, wrote to her that the ‘raw and ruthless life outside the gates of university awaits you’. My father always would say my daughter will go into politics. They used to have these gas pipes, and I was always a very curious child and they told me, “Don’t touch those pipes.” And I went and touched them and opened it up and my parents came back just in time because I nearly poisoned the whole household. Her death was a devastating loss to her country, but the cause of democracy she championed is carried on by her family and followers. It’s a game of mathematics. Of the 12 years I’ve been married, my husband has been behind bars for seven, so I say, “How is it life?” Again we are in politics, and the children won’t have the mother or the father, and my son is now 12. Was there a moment of self revelation or self-discovery when you knew what you wanted to do with your life, that you were going to be different just as your father had been different? She represented the political party Popular Party of Pakistan (PPP), a center-left party. So I feel a great empathy now when there is a rediscovering of the way — of how people should be allowed to pass away. I wish I had tackled the so-called corruption issues more deeply. But it’s ambiguous, because while people want me, they have reservations. Weeks before a national election in which Benazir Bhutto and her party were expected to prevail, she was assassinated by a suicide bomber. At the time of her death, Bialawal was only 19, still an undergraduate at Oxford. My father was himself an achiever and maybe it was a time of achievers. She was born with silver spoon in her mouth. In the autumn of 2007, in the face of death threats from radical Islamists, and the hostility of the government, Benazir Bhutto and her husband returned to their native country. I don’t know why. I want my daughter to have the same opportunities.”, Benazir Bhutto: I really don’t know, because I never had a chance to ask him. He said, “Boys and girls are equal. It’s an around the clock job. She belongs to a political and landlord family. I tell them, “Wait a minute. So when the burden grows heavy I turn to God and say, “God, don’t let it be so heavy that I cannot put up with it.” So I would say that in solitary confinement when I had nobody to talk to. So she started behaving differently and we thought it’s because she’s had this serious illness, and she’s reflecting on how to lead her life. If you ask a man what he wants to be, he’ll turn around and say, “A businessman,” or “A lawyer,” but the girl students that I talked to all wanted to be prime minister. I remember the iodized salt; the clerics said, “You shouldn’t eat iodized salt because it has really got population control in it, and you won’t be able to have any children.” So we did take on an agenda that frightened the people who believed in the status quo, and who actually believed in a tribal patriarchal society, because to a great extent there is still an undercurrent of a patriarchal society in Pakistan. Could you begin by telling us something about your childhood in Karachi? He was very much against the status quo, so he was always telling us that it is wrong, that there should be people in such abject poverty, unable to feed their children. But at the same time we got the three years to eliminate polio, to build schools and electrify villages. Do you ever stop and think back on how you might have handled things differently in your career, in your life? Were you aware of these disparities? Benazir Bhutto: You have to keep going and keep in touch with people. Part of it is the information technology because it brings what is happening in the rest of the world to ordinary women in parts of the Muslin world and they say, “Why not us?”. At that time many women still thought that their objective in life was to go and be married, and not so much to have a career. The first time I caught a plane and was reintroduced to the real world, one of the air hostesses just saw me and she hugged me and she said that, “You know it was during your time that my brother got a job and changed our family’s life.” Then I remember that when I reached Karachi — I was going home — the whole union had gathered, and the whole union received me and they threw rose petals all over me. 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