Within forty years of the setting up of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in 1967 at Lahore, the Ghari Khuda Bux cemetery has received four members of Bhutto family in succession or one Bhutto in a decade, all killed in mysterious circumstances. The dynasty has a tinge of tragedy, curse and trouble like the Kennedeys in America and Ghandis in India. But many Pakistanis love dead Bhuttos more than when they were alive.
Zulifkar Ali Bhutto (ZAB), scion of Sindhi feudal origins, for the first time entered the Pakistani politics when he joined Skindar Mirza’s cabinet and there was no looking back and he came to be foreign minister in the cabinet of Ayub Khan, whom he called ‘Daddy.’ During the tumultuous period of 1960s then comes the parting of the ways with Ayub and Bhutto formed his political party in 1967.
The masses were drifted away in the ZAB’s rhetoric of “Roti, Kapra aur Makan,’ and, “My ministers would sweep the streets of Layari.” ZAB added to politics a new dimension, and brought it to the Kukri Ground, Liaquat Bagh and Bhati Chowk and liberated it from the clutches of political ‘elite’.
In 1977, ZAB was overthrown in an army coup and thrown put behind bars and hanged on April 4, 1979 after a sham trial, which is remembered as the ‘Judicial Murder’ in the annals of Pakistan’s judicial history. No one has been sentenced to death, except ZAB, on charges of abetting a murder since the Indian Penal Code was promulgated in the 1860s.
In 1985, the family received its second shock, when ZAB’s younger son Shahnawaz Bhutto, 27, was found dead in a Southern France apartment and his murder still remains a mystery.
Benazir Bhutto became a heir to his father’s political legacy after she returned from exile in 1984. Millions of Pakistanis greeted her when she returned from her exile and traveled across Pakistan and was the first elected female premier of the country after the death of Zia in a plane crash in 1988. In her second stint as a prime minister in 1996, her only brother Murtaza Bhutto was shot dead in mysterious circumstances by police. His murder still remains a mystery.
Benazir Bhutto went on a self-imposed exile in 1999 and remained abroad for around eight years and came back to the country in 2007. Her homecoming rally turned into a mourning procession on October 18 when a suicide bomber targeted her vehicle killing nearly 180 people while she barely escaped the attack. She was again attacked on December 27 while coming out of her public meeting at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi. She died when an unknown assassin fired shots on her and later a suicide bomber blew him up near her vehicle, while mystery is still shrouding her death.
