By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Bilawal Bhutto Zardari spent the weekend watching the internet marry him off.
By Monday, the chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party had heard enough. In a video statement posted to social media, he said that he is not engaged, is not getting married, and has never met the Austrian noblewoman the rumors had already fitted him for a wedding suit alongside.
“Social media has got me engaged, got me married,” Bilawal said. “I want to make clear that nothing of this sort has happened, nor do I know any Princess Gloria.”
The 37-year-old son of President Asif Ali Zardari and assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has spent much of the past week fending off a story that grew largely on its own momentum. It began, according to Pakistani news outlets, with a report in the Urdu-language Daily Ausaf claiming preparations were underway for Bilawal’s wedding — a report the paper later retracted. From there it metastasised: by the weekend, social media accounts had the president traveling to Vienna, or perhaps Liechtenstein, to negotiate a match with a European royal family, with a wedding penciled in for later this year.
The woman at the center of the speculation, commentators eventually settled on, was Archduchess Gloria von Habsburg, 26, a great-granddaughter of Karl I, the last reigning Habsburg emperor of Austria. There is no public indication the archduchess has ever met Bilawal, and neither she nor her family has commented.
What is confirmed is narrower. The Presidency posted on X on Aug. 27 that Zardari “has proceeded abroad on a private visit,” offering no further detail — an eight-word statement that proved more than enough kindling for a rumor already burning on its own. A day before Bilawal’s video, Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab, a senior PPP figure, wrote on X that reports of an engagement or wedding were “incorrect and unfounded.” His post drew a wry reply from Bilawal’s sister, Aseefa Bhutto-Zardari: “My brother’s getting married and I’m just sitting here in Karachi. Wow.”
Bilawal, for his part, was not amused, at least not on camera.
“If any such decision about my life is made, the announcement will come from my family,” he said. “Till then, focus on the real issues and ignore the social media fuss.”
He argued the entire episode had been engineered — or at least seized upon — to pull attention from more consequential news. “The social media ruckus was made to distract the public’s attention from the real issues,” he said.
Chief among those, in his telling, was the government’s handling of a fire that killed 14 infants at a hospital in the capital five days earlier.
The blaze broke out shortly before 7 a.m. on Aug. 26 in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, on the third floor of the hospital’s Mother and Child Health ward. Fifteen newborns were in the nursery at the time; a nurse managed to pull one out before flames and smoke overtook the room within roughly two minutes, according to an interim government inquiry. Rescue officials have pointed to an exploding air-conditioner compressor as the likely trigger, though the hospital’s own initial report suggested a nebulizer near an incubator. The inquiry’s precise finding on ignition remains unresolved.
The aftermath has been bitter. Parents accused nursery staff of being absent when the fire started and said rescue crews took roughly two hours to arrive. The interim report, released days later, cleared frontline clinical staff of abandoning the infants, citing security footage that showed immediate rescue attempts, but it also faulted the hospital’s broader safety record and recommended legal action against the outside security contractor, Belfort Security, for failing its contractual duties. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered the federal health secretary, Aslam Ghori, suspended within days of the fire.
Bilawal placed the blame squarely on Health Minister Mustafa Kamal, invoking, not for the first time in Pakistani political rhetoric, the last leader of the Soviet Union.
“A minister who wants to become the Gorbachev of Pakistan and divide our country into 30 pieces cannot manage one hospital himself,” he said.
The jab was not incidental. Kamal, a senior leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, has for months pressed for Karachi to be carved out of Sindh province and placed under direct federal control, arguing the city — Pakistan’s largest and its commercial engine — has absorbed political costs it should no longer have to bear. He has framed the proposal as a matter of constitutional right, citing provisions that govern the designation of federal territories.
The PPP, which governs Sindh and has built much of its identity around the province’s territorial integrity, has resisted the idea at every turn. Sindh’s chief minister, Murad Ali Shah, addressing the provincial assembly on the very day Bilawal recorded his video, used language nearly identical to his party chief’s, telling lawmakers that the province’s future would be decided “by members of the Sindh Assembly, not businessmen from Lahore.” Shah noted the assembly has voted against dividing Sindh five times since 1948, most recently this year.
Bilawal echoed that argument in his own remarks. “At a time when a minister from Lahore is telling Lahore’s businessmen to create and run provinces, the Sindh Assembly has taken a courageous stance,” he said, adding that any decision on the province’s future belonged in that chamber and nowhere else. He noted, as PPP officials often do, that Sindh was the first province to accede to Pakistan at independence.
Whether that debate quiets the broader dispute is an open question. What Monday’s video did settle, at least for now, is smaller and more personal: Bilawal Bhutto Zardari says he is not getting married, to an archduchess or anyone else, and any announcement to the contrary will come from his family — not from an unsourced post on the internet.
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