issues were staples of her campaigns. However, her stated policies were rarely translated into action. No legislation to improve welfare services for women was proposed. Campaign promises to repeal Hudood and
Zina ordinances, which called for punishments such as amputations for
theft and stoning for adultery, went unfulfilled. To be sure, Bhutto faced
significant obstacles in advancing any legislative agenda.
Much of the decision making remained in the hands of the military and the intelligence agencies, where Zia had placed it. Bhutto was reluctant to challenge these powers, since the military had time and again
demonstrated readiness to take over the government when threatened. Perhaps she was fearful as well the army, after all, was the institution
responsible for the execution of her father. She had also inherited many political enemies of her father’s, and
Pakistani politics remained as focused on personal power and games-manship as on advancing the national interest. A major PPP adversary
was Nawaz Sharif, leader of the PML and chief minister of Punjab, the most populous province. The PML and PPP were natural enemies; PPP founder Zulfikar Bhutto had nationalized industries to break the power of Pakistan’s wealthiest families, and one of those families was Nawaz Sharif’s. Moreover, Nawaz Sharif was a protégé of Zia, the military
ruler who had Zulfikar Bhutto hanged. Benazir Bhutto spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to oust Nawaz Sharif from his post in the Punjab. Another problem Bhutto faced was in the person
of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, with whom she clashed repeatedly, especially over military and judicial appointments.
Just as significant, Bhutto was unable to parlay the electoral success of the PPP coalition and her own popularity into creating a cohesive
domestic policy for Pakistan. Bhutto’s alliance with the MQM, while put-
ting the PPP over the top in the national elections, proved an obstacle when it came to parliamentary action. Furthermore, her alliance with
the rival political bloc weakened her credibility within the PPP (though
it never threatened her leadership of the party), especially among the Sindi nationalists who had been among her strongest supporters. One of Bhutto’s notable shortcomings during this and her second administration
as prime minister was her failure to follow through on her announced
campaign initiatives to improve women’s health care and other social issues concerning women. In fact, “the PPP government’s performance was lacklustre, with not a single new piece of legislation being passed or even introduced, apart from two annual budgets” (Jacques 2000, 170). Another, but no less important, domestic issue where Bhutto floundered regarded Islam. Like her father, Benazir Bhutto was a secularist who, as an opposition leader, had denounced Zia’s move toward Islamization of Pakistan. As prime minister she altered this stance for
political expediency but discovered that other groups and leaders were farther ahead than she was in this approach. Nevertheless, her hard-line stance in early 1990 regarding the ongoing Kashmir dispute with India
gained her credibility with the religious party Jamaat-i-Islami.Despite these problems Bhutto’s fi rst term as prime minister was not
completely ineffectual. During her 20 months in power, she ended a
ban on unions in Pakistan and, as part of her program to modernize Pakistan, she pushed for rural electrification. She also attempted to
encourage private investment in the Pakistani economy.
However, her efforts were hampered by the ethnic violence that pervaded Sindh and would ultimately cause the MQM to remove itself from the ruling coalition, paralyzing Pakistan’s Parliament and further destabilizing Bhutto’s domestic program.