Bhutto's successor: A profile

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Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

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Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who became the youngest chairman of the 40-year-old Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on December 30, 2007, was born on September 21, 1988, nearly three months before his slain mother Benazir Bhutto was elected the prime minister of Pakistan for the first time.

He needs another six years to qualify for election to the National Assembly and, subsequently, as the prime minister of Pakistan.

Bilawal, 19, is studying political science at Oxford where he was enrolled in the fall of 2007. Both his maternal grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) and his mother, Benazir, had studied there. When ZAB was sent to the gallows in 1979, Benazir was a student at Harvard.

Bilawal will remain a figurehead chief of the PPP in the next few years. In the meantime, Asif Zardari, his father who became the co-chairman, will effectively run the party.

After getting primary education at Islamabad’s Froebel’s School, Bilawal accompanied his mother to Dubai when she went into self-exile and studied at a school there.

The teenager PPP chairman likes target-shooting, swimming, horse-riding and squash, and regrets being away from Pakistan in part because it meant he played less cricket.

“My grandfather was a very courageous man and I consider myself very lucky because I have three powerful role models that will obviously influence my career choices when I am older,” he was quoted as saying once.

Seeing his mother perform in politics, Bilawal was groomed to step into her shoes. He became the third head of the PPP and thus followed his grandfather ZAB, who founded the party in 1967, led Pakistan as prime minister for four years in the 1970s and was hanged in 1979, and Benazir, who took over from her father, was assassinated in Rawalpindi on September 27, 2007.

Bilawal accepted the leadership of the PPP on December 30, 2007 and immediately vowed to fight for democracy as revenge for his mother’s assassination. At an emotional news conference where he was presented as chairman and his father as co-chairman of the PPP, Bilawal, untested in politics, said he was ready to lead.

At the same conference it was announced that henceforth Bilawal’s family name and that of his sisters, Bakhtawar and Asifa, would be Bhutto Zardari, instead of only Zardari.

“My mother always said that democracy is the best revenge,” Bilawal told the news conference at the family home in Naudero. “The party’s long and historic struggle for democracy will continue with a new vigour.”

Bilawal, who is more familiar with the high streets of Dubai and London than with Pakistan’s troubled electorate, said that like his mother he would be the symbol of the federation of Pakistan.

As a 16-year-old at high school, he told the Press Trust of India in an interview in 2004 that he felt justice and democracy held the key to resolving Pakistan’s problems.

Asked if he would one day enter the whirlpool of Pakistani politics, Bilawal, a taekwondo black-belt and horse-riding enthusiast like his father, was quoted as saying: “We will see, I don’t know. I would like to help the people of Pakistan, so I will decide when I finish my studies. I can either enter politics, or I can enter another career that would benefit the people.”