Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (5 January 1928 to 4 April 1979) was the founder of the Pakistan People's Party, President of Pakistan from December 1971 and its Prime Minister from August 1973 to July 1977. Born in Sindh, he led a party founded in Lahore. He appears in this record as the head of the state across the border in the 1970s, as the man who settled the aftermath of the 1971 war with India, and as the leader whose fall brought General Zia ul-Haq to power.

Key moments

• 30 November 1967: he founded the Pakistan People's Party at the Lahore home of Mubashir Hassan.
• 20 December 1971: after Pakistan's defeat in the war that created Bangladesh, he became President and the first civilian Chief Martial Law Administrator.
• 2 July 1972: he and Indira Gandhi signed the Simla Agreement at Shimla. It committed the two countries to settle differences through bilateral talks and turned the ceasefire line of 17 December 1971 into the Line of Control. The return of the roughly 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war was left to later talks and settled by a separate Delhi Agreement of 28 August 1973.
• 14 August 1973: he became Prime Minister under the new constitution. His government nationalised major industries and banks, started Pakistan's nuclear programme, and hosted the Islamic Summit at Lahore in 1974.
• 14 September 1974: the date on the Indian government's record of the India-Pakistan Protocol on Visits to Religious Shrines, under which Sikh jathas from India visit Nankana Sahib, Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal and other gurdwaras in Pakistan, as the Tribune and Wikipedia record. It dates from his premiership.
• 5 July 1977: General Zia ul-Haq deposed him after the opposition alleged rigging in the 1977 election.
• 4 April 1979: he was hanged in Rawalpindi, about two months after the Supreme Court upheld his conviction for the murder of a political rival. On 6 March 2024 a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court gave its opinion on a presidential reference, saying it "didn't find that the fair trial and due process requirements were met". Al Jazeera describes it as an opinion and an acknowledgment of injustice, and reports no change to the conviction.

What he is remembered for: the 1973 Constitution, the Simla Agreement, and a trial that many Pakistani legal experts called a judicial murder. Pakistan's Supreme Court, 45 years later, found it did not meet the standard of a fair trial.