Political+Career+Bhutto

Bhutto became active in politics after her father, PM Zulifikar Ali Bhutto was ousted from office in a bloodless military coup led by General Muhammad Zia Ul-Haq who was later executed in April 1979. Following her father’s execution, Bhutto pledged to carry her father’s political flame and eventually became a pioneer for democracy.
 * Bhutto: Political Career **

Following the hanging of her father, Bhutto was arrested repeatedly, however, following PPP's victory in the local elections Zia postponed the national elections indefinitely and moved Bhutto and her mother Nusrat Bhutto from Karachi to Larkana. This was the seventh time Benazir had been arrested within two years of the military coup. Repeatedly put under house arrest, the regime finally imprisoned her under solitary confinement in a desert cell in Sindhi province during the summer of 1981.

In 1984, under pressure from the west, Bhutto was finally released. She fled to London, where she became the focus of widespread resistence to Zia’s military regime. When martial law was lifted in 1986, Benazir Bhutto returned to be Zia’s most powerful and potent political opponent.

Having sworn to carry her father's political flame, Benazir Bhutto overcame government persecution and lack of political experience, leading her Pakistan Peoples Party to victory in the November 1988 and October 1993 parliamentary elections. When she was sworn in as PM on 2 December 1988, she became the youngest female prime minister in history.

As Prime Minister, Bhutto has been praised for moving swiftly to restore civil liberties and political freedom, suspended under military rule. During her terms of office, she has faced enormous challenges in governing a poor, politically fractious, and ethnically diverse nation.

Although she herself was 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. She was elected a second time in 1993, but the president of the country dismissed her from office and dissolved the National Assembly. A military coup drove her from the country yet again, but after more than eight years in exile, Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007 only to be assassinated in November of the same year in tragic circumstances.