Benazir Bhutto, a woman of courage, boldness, and resilience who
27th December is marked every year as the death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto – one of the greatest leaders of the world and the first Muslim woman to head an Islamic country. She was an epitome of courage, resoluteness, steadfastness, and resilience. Her intrepidity is eulogized not only by his diehard ideologues but also by her worst detractors. Her life is characterized by the indefatigable struggle against the despotic forces of dictatorship and fascism. She left no stone unturned to get democratic ethos entrenched in the political, social and economic order of the country.
She carried forward the legacy of populism as inculcated by her great father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in such an amazing way that people become so deeply infatuated with her that the eyes of every Pakistani wept ocean of tears over her untimely and painful assassination. Her cold-blooded murder shook rank and file of Pakistani masses and her unforgettable and charismatic persona would continue to impress the generations to come.
Benazir Bhutto was born June 21, 1953, the first of four children in a well-to-do landowning family of the province of Sindh. She grew up in surroundings littered with the trappings and perks of Pakistan’s post-colonial, English-speaking elite. She was attended to by an English governess, called by her nickname, “Pinkie,” due to her rosy complexion and enrolled in Roman Catholic convent school.
She paid a price for her promise. Over the next five years, with the Pakistan People’s Party outlawed, Bhutto was in and out of detention, sometimes at home, under house arrest, or in prison, under harrowing conditions
While at 16, she had to leave for Redcliff College, Harvard University for which she was not mentally prepared. “I cried and cried and cried because I had never walked to classes in my life before,” she once told an interviewer. “I’d always been driven to school in a car and picked up in a car, and here I had to walk and walk and walk. It was cold, bitterly cold, and I hated it … but it forced me to grow up. “
From Harvard, she went on to Oxford University to study politics, philosophy, and economics, an arena where she honed her debating skills by becoming the first foreign woman to be elected president of the prestigious Oxford Union. She was a brilliant student and excelled in oratory at Harvard and Oxford, inspiring not just minds but also connecting hearts — it was she who introduced the incumbent British Prime Minister Theresa May to Philip May who would become her husband.
A shrewd politician and a committed family woman, Benazir had a legacy that refused to die down with her; As a veteran journalist Hasan Mujtaba commented in his poem, “Tum zinda hokar Murda ho/Wo Murda hokar Zinda hai (You are already dead while you live/She is alive even after her death).
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