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Benazir Bhutto only entered politics after her father was
executed by the military.
On Thursday she was assassinated, a depressingly predictable end
for a member of one of South Asia's seemingly cursed political
dynasties.
Powerful families from the Bhuttos of Pakistan to the Gandhis of
India and the Bandaranaike family of Sri Lanka have dominated
politics in this diverse and polyglot region since independence
from Britain.
But none have escaped tragedy at the hands of rebels, extremists or
ambitious military leaders.
It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who founded Pakistan's troubled dynasty.
He became the country's first popularly elected prime minister but
was toppled by the army in 1977 and later hanged.
Both his sons died in mysterious circumstances.
His daughter Benazir, a former prime minister, was lucky to survive
when a suicide attack on her motorcade killed nearly 150 people as
she returned to Pakistan in October after eight years in
exile.
Later that month she paid an emotional return to her father's grave
in their ancestral village in southern Pakistan.
"There is still danger of attack, but Allah can protect everyone
and I am not scared," she said.
In India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh
bodyguards as she walked in her garden in 1984, cradled by her
Italian daughter-in-law Sonia as she lay dying.
The tragedy propelled her son and Sonia's husband Rajiv into
politics and into her shoes as head of government.
He in turn was blown up by a female suicide bomber in 1991 at an
election rally.
With grim prescience, Sonia wrote she had "fought like a tigress"
to prevent Rajiv entering politics.
After he died, she desperately wanted to stay out of politics, only
to yield in 1998 after enormous pressure from the Congress party.
Today she is India's most powerful politician.
"That's part of political lives, and my mother-in-law and my
husband lived and died for the country," she said in an interview
in 2004. "I don't believe they wished to die in any other
way."
This crowded region has faced an array of violent uprisings by
groups who felt excluded by democracy. The military has often felt
it could do a better job of ruling than politicians.
That's helped to make politics a risky career path.
"In this region there is this struggle between the ballot and the
bullet," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst and Delhi
University history professor.
"There are elements and groups who wish to settle political scores by ending debate," he added.
Unhappy families
The murders have ironically helped sustain those dynasties the
assassins tried to destroy, propelling sometimes reluctant heirs
into the limelight, giving them both a powerful sense of a legacy
to be fulfilled and a wave of sympathy on which to ride.
In Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike was
killed by a Buddhist monk in 1959.
His wife Sirimavo succeeded him to become the world's first female
prime minister.
His daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga, also became prime minister and
then president, only to lose sight in her right eye after an
assassination attempt by suspected Tamil Tiger rebels in
1999.
In Bangladesh, which split from Pakistan in 1971, the country's two
leading politicians had similarly violent starts to their political
careers.
Sheikh Hasina entered politics after her father, independence
leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was killed in a military coup in
1975.
The man who came to power after that coup, General Ziaur Rahman,
was himself killed in an abortive military mutiny in 1981. His wife
Begum Khaleda Zia was not daunted, giving up life as a housewife to
join politics herself.
She became the Muslim country's first female prime minister in
1991, before bitter rival Sheikh Hasina took over the top job in
1996. Today, both have been detained by a military-backed
government and face prosecution for corruption.
It is not only dynasties which have suffered.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known as the Mahatma or Great Soul, was
assassinated in 1948. Pakistan's first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali
Khan was shot and killed in 1951 in Rawalpindi, the same city in
which Benazir Bhutto died on Thursday.
In a family interview with India's Outlook magazine in Dubai last
year, Benazir said she hoped her three children would choose a
different career path.
"Even though I come from a political family with a strong sense of
duty to my country I would strongly advise them to stay away from
politics, to serve the country in other ways," she was quoted as
saying. "As a doctor, a social worker, anything."
"My children have told me they are very worried about my safety. I
understand those fears. But they are Bhuttos and we have to face
the future with courage, whatever it brings," she said.
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