Benazir Bhutto was more than a leader: Umar Rehman Malik

Abdullah Jan

Islamabad: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Umar Rehman Malik said this week that Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was more than a leader.

“Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was more than a leader—she was a symbol of resilience and transformation,” he said in a statement.

The PPP leader said that as the first woman to lead the Islamic world, she carried the weight of history with unwavering courage, dignity, and determination.

“Nearly five decades ago, she broke new ground as the first female Asian President of the Oxford Union—a milestone that foreshadowed her lifelong fight for democracy, equality, and justice. She ultimately gave her life for these ideals,” he added.

On February 20th, Umar Rehman Malik said, her legacy was honored at the Oxford Union, the very place where she once stood as a young visionary, destined to shape the future.

Benazir Bhutto was a popular politician and stateswoman who served as the 11th prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990, and again from 1993 to 1996.

She was also the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. A liberal and a secularist ideologically, she chaired or co-chaired the PPP from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007.

She studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she was President of the Oxford Union. Her father, the PPP leader Zulfikar Bhutto, was elected prime minister on a socialist platform in 1973. She returned to Pakistan in 1977, shortly before 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 regime and self-exiled to Great 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.