Bilawal pledges to return to Pakistan to lead PPP

LONDON - Pakistan People’s Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has pledged to return to Pakistan and lead the party.

Speaking at a lecture held in memory of his assassinated mother and former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto here on Monday evening, Bilal described her a woman of accomplishment who had transformed Pakistani society.

He told participants in the Grand Committee Room of the House of Commons that Benazir had established 86,000 more primary and secondary schools, providing electricity to villages across Pakistan, quadrupled foreign investment, exports boomed, female health workers fanned across Pakistan, women were admitted to courts, banks and police stations for the first time during her two terms as Prime Minister.

The Daily Times quoted him as saying further that it was under Bhutto’s leadership that international channels were introduced in Pakistan and the software industry blossomed, prisoners were freed and civil liberties introduced after a dark period of dictatorship.

Bilawal said her accomplishments were more remarkable because of the resistance she faced from the hostile elements.

Focussing on what his mother could have achieved if she had not been assassinated on December 27, 2007 in a bomb attack in Rawalpindi, he said: “Three quarters of a billion Muslim women all around the world would have felt empowered, almost two billion Muslims around the world would have seen a modern face of Islam belying the caricature of our great religion in the West and the demagoguery of the jihadis within our own ranks,” he added.

He pointed that moderate and tolerant Islam would have had a true leader not afraid to challenge dictators, generals, jihadis and the terrorists.

Conservative MP Rehman Chishti, who also worked as an adviser and researcher to the slain PPP leader, arranged the event.

It was also attended by Benazir’s daughter Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK Wajid Shamsul Hasan, MP Gerald Howarth, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Ministry of Defence MP Attorney General Dominic Grieve, diplomats and socialites. (ANI)