stylistic:style_transfer, structural:expansion, structural:reformatting, information:filtering, quality:corruption
Childhood: 1953–1968

Bhutto was born at Pinto's Nursing Home on 21 June 1953 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani. The latter was born in Isfahan, Persia (now Iran) to a wealthy Persian merchant family of partial Kurdish descent. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh, part of the waderos or landed gentry. They were Shia Muslims.

Benazir, in her autobiography "Daughter of the East", said "The diaries of one of our ancestors, giving the family details, were washed away in a great flood in my great-grandfather's time. But as children, we were told we were either descended from the Rajputs...or from the Arabs who entered India through our home province of Sindh in AD 712."

Some say that Benazir Bhutto is descended from the Arains, a Muslim tribe of Punjab, who have a subclan called Bhutta, and they also claim to be descended from the Arabs who entered India in AD 712 while others say that Benazir is descended from the Rajputs.

The couple had married in September 1951, and Benazir was their first child. She was given the name of an aunt who had died young. The Bhuttos' three younger children were Murtaza (born 1954), Sanam (1957), and Shahnawaz (1958). When the elderly Shah Nawaz died in 1957, Zulfikar inherited the family's land holdings, making him extremely wealthy.

Benazir's first language was English; as a child she spoke Urdu less frequently although she was fluent, and barely spoke the local Sindhi language. Her mother taught her some Persian as a child. Benazir initially attended the Lady Jennings Nursery School in Karachi. She was then sent to the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi and from there to the Jesus and Mary Convent, a boarding school in Murree. Murree is near the border with India, and during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 Bhutto and the other pupils underwent air-raid practices. Taking her exams in December 1968, Bhutto passed her O-levels with high grades.

Throughout her youth, Bhutto idolised her father, and he, in turn, encouraged her educational development in contravention of traditional approaches to women then pervasive in Pakistan. Relations between her parents were however strained during her childhood; Zulfikar embarked on extra-marital affairs with other women, and when Nusrat objected he had her thrown out of their house. She moved to Iran, but after Zulfikar prevented her children from joining her there, she returned to Pakistan six months later, settling in Karachi. Throughout her life, Bhutto never publicly acknowledged this internal family discord.

When Bhutto was five, her father became the cabinet minister for energy, and when she was nine he became the country's foreign minister. From an early age, she was exposed to foreign diplomats and figures who were visiting her father, among them Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger, and Hubert Humphrey. When she was thirteen, he resigned from the government and a year later established his own political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). The PPP used the motto "Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people." It employed a populist strategy to attract votes, promising "roti, kapra aur makan" (bread, clothes, and housing) for every Pakistani and insisting that the disputed territory of Kashmir would be transferred from Indian to Pakistani control. Benazir immediately joined. Amid riots against the government of President Ayub Khan, in 1968 Zulfikar was arrested and imprisoned for three months, during which he wrote to Benazir to encourage her studies.