Benazir Bhutto (Sindhi: بينظير ڀُٽو; 21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician who served as Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority nation. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007.
Of mixed Sindhi and Kurdish parentage, Bhutto was born in Karachi to a politically important, wealthy aristocratic family. Her father, the PPP's founder and leader Zulfikar, was elected Prime Minister on a socialist platform in 1973. Bhutto studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she was President of the Oxford Union. She returned to Pakistan, where her father was ousted in a 1977 military coup and executed. Bhutto and her mother Nusrat took control of the PPP and led the country's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy; Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's military government and then exiled to 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. As Prime Minister, her attempts at reform were stifled by conservative and Islamist forces, including President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the powerful military. Her administration was accused of corruption and nepotism, and dismissed by Khan in 1990. Intelligence services rigged the 1990 election to ensure a victory for the conservative Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), after which Bhutto served as the Leader of the Opposition.