Bhutto a victim of South Asia's cursed dynasties

By Simon Denyer

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Benazir Bhutto only entered politics after her father was executed by the military.

On Thursday she was assassinated, a depressingly predictable end for a member of one of South Asia's seemingly cursed political dynasties.

Powerful families from the Bhuttos of Pakistan to the Gandhis of India and the Bandaranaike family of Sri Lanka have dominated politics in this diverse and polyglot region since independence from Britain.

But none have escaped tragedy at the hands of rebels, extremists or ambitious military leaders.

It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who founded Pakistan's troubled dynasty. He became the country's first popularly elected prime minister but was toppled by the army in 1977 and later hanged.

Both his sons died in mysterious circumstances.

His daughter Benazir, a former prime minister, was lucky to survive when a suicide attack on her motorcade killed nearly 150 people as she returned to Pakistan in October after eight years in exile.

Later that month she paid an emotional return to her father's grave in their ancestral village in southern Pakistan.

"There is still danger of attack, but Allah can protect everyone and I am not scared," she said.

In India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguards as she walked in her garden in 1984, cradled by her Italian daughter-in-law Sonia as she lay dying.

The tragedy propelled her son and Sonia's husband Rajiv into politics and into her shoes as head of government.

He in turn was blown up by a female suicide bomber in 1991 at an election rally.

With grim prescience, Sonia wrote she had "fought like a tigress" to prevent Rajiv entering politics.

After he died, she desperately wanted to stay out of politics, only to yield in 1998 after enormous pressure from the Congress party. Today she is India's most powerful politician.

"That's part of political lives, and my mother-in-law and my husband lived and died for the country," she said in an interview in 2004. "I don't believe they wished to die in any other way."