In Pakistan’s politics, the most consequential disagreements rarely end at negotiating tables. They end instead in courtrooms without verdicts, in prisons without closure, and at graves without accountability. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s first female prime minister and one of the most prominent democratic leaders in the Muslim world, was one such ending, not merely because it silenced a former prime minister, but because it exposed a political culture that continues to resolve disagreement without coexistence.
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on 27 December 2007, in a gun-and-bomb attack after addressing an election rally in Rawalpindi. Just weeks earlier, she had survived a suicide bombing in Karachi that killed at least 123 people, one of the deadliest attacks in the country’s history. She was neither the first nor the last major political figure to be violently removed from Pakistan’s political stage.
Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot dead at a public meeting in Rawalpindi in 1951. Between these two deaths lie other forms of political elimination: the judicial execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the unexplained circumstances surrounding the death of leaders such as H.S. Suhrawardy, and the sudden demise of General Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash that itself generated decades of suspicion. Together, they reflect a system that has struggled to resolve political conflict through institutions alone.
Political assassination in Pakistan has rarely been treated as a moral or systemic failure. Instead, it is routinely reduced to questions of security lapses or intelligence breakdowns. This framing misses the point. What these episodes expose is a deeper ethical collapse, a political order in which opponents are not seen as legitimate actors, but as threats to be neutralised. In mature political systems, even deeply polarising leaders are expected to lose power without losing life or liberty, returning to public life through elections, memoirs, or retirement rather than courts or graves. In Pakistan, politics has often operated on a more absolutist logic: that one side’s survival depends on the other’s removal.
The handling of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination exemplifies this political dysfunction in Pakistan. In the years following her death, four separate inquiries were conducted: by a police joint investigation team, the Federal Investigation Agency, the United Nations, and Scotland Yard. A total of 16 individuals were accused, yet only eight were ever arrested.
The principal suspect, then Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a drone strike. Several other accused were killed in encounters. The suicide bomber himself died at the scene. Twelve challans were filed, 355 court appearances recorded, 10 judges changed, and 141 witnesses testified, including 68 prosecution witnesses. Despite this, the case yielded little closure.
Until the country learns to argue without annihilating, to alternate power without humiliation, and to recognise opposition as an essential democratic function rather than an existential danger, 27 December will continue to return, not as history, but as an indictment
Two senior police officers, former Rawalpindi city police officer Saud Aziz and superintendent of police Khurram Shehzad, were eventually convicted by an anti-terrorism court for destroying evidence and failing to provide adequate security, and were sentenced to imprisonment and fines.
Within months, however, the Lahore High Court suspended their sentences, leading to their release; both later resumed or completed their careers, with Shehzad eventually promoted to the rank of Deputy Inspector General. Former president Pervez Musharraf was declared a fugitive in absentia in the case, while appeals filed by the federal government, the accused, and members of the Bhutto family have remained pending for years.
Even the federal prosecutor pursuing the case, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, was assassinated in 2013. Nearly eighteen years later, the case continues to drift through the courts, emblematic of a justice system that is either unable or unwilling to reach a final resolution in matters involving power. This pattern of impunity not only fails to protect victims; it also reshapes political incentives, encouraging the search for quieter, more legally deniable forms of elimination.
Assassination, however, is only the most visible endpoint of a longer process. Long before violence becomes physical, it becomes rhetorical. Political opponents are delegitimised, portrayed as traitors, foreign agents, or existential threats to the state. Accountability mechanisms are selectively applied, while public humiliation replaces debate. Compromise is often framed as betrayal, and dialogue is viewed as weakness. In such an environment, the transition from dehumanisation to elimination is not abrupt; it is gradual and disturbingly logical.
To place Benazir Bhutto within this context is not to sanctify her politics or ignore the controversies of her time in office. Leaders can be flawed, governance can be criticised, and policies can be rejected, all without justifying violence. The central issue is not whether Benazir Bhutto was beyond reproach, but whether any political disagreement warrants erasure. A political culture that answers dissent with death has already forfeited its moral legitimacy.
By 2025, political violence in Pakistan will not have vanished; it has evolved into less visible but no less consequential forms. While assassinations are less frequent, quieter forms of political elimination have become normalised. Prolonged incarceration without conviction, selective accountability through courts, enforced disappearances, and sustained character assassination now perform the work once done by bullets.
Across successive governments, prominent political leaders from different parties have been arrested, disqualified, or rendered politically inactive through overlapping legal cases, often during critical electoral periods. Parties have found their leadership decapitated, their organisational capacity restricted, and their ability to campaign curtailed through administrative and judicial interventions.
In parallel, enforced disappearances, particularly in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, continue to target activists, students, and dissenting voices, regardless of partisan affiliation. Journalists critical of state institutions face intimidation, legal harassment, exile, or worse, as seen in cases such as the killing of Arshad Sharif, Saleem Shahzad and the persistent pressure on reporters covering security and governance issues. These practices may not always result in death, but they serve the same purpose: narrowing political space until coexistence becomes impossible.
The inability to “sit across the table” is therefore not rhetorical; it is structural. It reflects a deeper absence of consensus on political rules, civilian supremacy, and institutional authority. Electoral outcomes are frequently treated as provisional arrangements rather than binding verdicts, vulnerable to post-election engineering through courts, coalition-building under pressure, or administrative intervention.
The repeated use of disqualification, whether through Article 62(1)(f), contempt proceedings, or accountability courts, has ensured that leaders such as Nawaz Sharif, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and now Imran Khan have each been removed not by voters alone, but through institutional processes that blur the line between accountability and political management. Opposition is thus framed not as representation, but as obstruction or threat, making instability a permanent feature rather than a temporary crisis.
27 December should thus be more than a day of mourning in Pakistan. It should force an honest reckoning with a political tradition that has repeatedly chosen elimination over engagement. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination did not end political violence in Pakistan; it confirmed how entrenched it already was. The methods have changed, the vocabulary has softened, but the outcome remains familiar.
Until the country learns to argue without annihilating, to alternate power without humiliation, and to recognise opposition as an essential democratic function rather than an existential danger, 27 December will continue to return, not as history, but as an indictment.