Banazir Bhutto, Pakistani Women’s Flawed Icon?

I could not agree more with Emily Wax’s piece in the Washington Post this week, “Pakistani Women’s Flawed Icon”. By the way that the late Prime Minister Banazir Bhutto had conducted her life, it is true that she was a brave woman, and political leader, but she had raised expectation for advancement of women in a Muslim society, and largely failed to fulfill them. Internationally, she was a controversial figure among feminists and democratic social activists. She went to the UN-organized International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, talking about women’s rights and family planning, but she did little, while in power, in following through with action in her country. She became pregnant one after the other while in office, that many people made a joke about her in that PPPP stands for “Pakistan Perpetually Pregnant Prime Minister”, rather than her leadership in the PPPP, a Political Party, the Peoples Party of Pakistan. She had taken many risks of putting her own life on the line when out speaking in the public places under warnings. She did not take these risks for women’s right in Pakistan, or for democracy. In a feudal way, she did it for her own and the Bhutto family’s place in the political history of Pakistan. I am sorry that, in the end, she had to pay with her own life to achieve that ambition.

Filed under Gender Issues, World Affairs |