Begum Nusrat Bhutto was an Iranian-Pakistani who was the former First Lady of Pakistan and widow of former Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She became her husband's successor as the chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) from 1979 to 1983. She was also the mother of the late PPP chairman and the first and only female Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. She died on October 23, 2011.
Nusrat Ispahnie was born in 1929 in Esfahan, Iran, hailing from the wealthy Hariri Esfahani family in Esfahan. Nusrat Bhutto was said to be of Kurdish descent. However, there are some claims that despite the fact that her family originates from the Kurdistan province in Iran the Kurdish connection only comes from her grandmother who had married into the Hariri family. Her father was a wealthy Iranian businessman who settled in Karachi, Pakistan. Nusrat met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Karachi where they got married on September 8, 1951. She was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's second wife, and they had four children together: Shahnawaz, Sanam, Murtaza and Benazir. Except Sanam, she outlived her three other children. Benazir's widow and Nusrat's son-in-law Asif Ali Zardari is currently serving as the President of Pakistan.
As first lady from 1973–77, she functioned as a political hostess and accompanied her husband on a number of overseas visits. In 1979, after the trial and execution of her husband, she succeeded her husband as leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party as chairman for life. In 1982, ill with cancer, she was given permission to leave the country by the military government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq for medical treatment in London at which point her daughter, Benazir Bhutto, became acting leader of the party, and, by 1984, the party chairman.
After returning to Pakistan in the late 1980s, she served several terms as a Member of Parliament to the National Assembly from the family constituency of Larkana, Sindh.
During the administrations of her daughter Benazir, she became a cabinet minister and Deputy Prime Minister. In the 1990s, she and Benazir became estranged when Nusrat took the side of her son Murtaza during a family dispute, but later reconciled after Murtaza's murder. She lived the last few years of her life with her daughter's family in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and suffered from the combined effects of a stroke and Alzheimer's disease. Source: wikipedia
She Died in the evening of 23rd October 2011
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