AFP

WHEN Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed as Pakistan's prime minister in 1977, his 24-year-old daughter, Benazir, looked on the bright side. She expected General Zia ul-Haq, the coup leader, to hold elections in a few months. “Don't be an idiot, Pinkie,” said her father, using the nickname inspired by her rosy complexion as an infant, “Armies do not take over power to relinquish it.”

Benazir idolised her father, who was executed by the military regime two years later. She inherited the leadership of his Pakistan People's Party—still the country's biggest—and some of his attributes: the curious, potent blend of idealism and cynicism, of wilful blindness and breathtaking courage, of populist charisma and elitist arrogance. Yet she seems never fully to have absorbed that piece of paternal wisdom. She devoted the last years of her life to trying to topple—or share power with—another coup leader, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president.

Benazir straddled three very different worlds. One was a feudal fief: her family's land in Sindh province. As a child, she loved to hear the story of how Charles Napier, the British conqueror of Sindh, had in 1843 marvelled at the extent of the Bhutto holdings. After her father's death, she found herself on the ancestral turf adjudicating over marital disputes among local villagers as if they were her serfs. When she married, it was an arranged match, with a Sindhi bigwig, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she described in her autobiography as “the heir to the chiefdom of the 100,000-strong Zardari tribe”. When they met in London, he wooed her with crates of mangoes from Fortnum & Mason, and marrons glacés. They had three children, and she was fiercely loyal to him, even after friends as well as foes came to regard him as sleazy and corrupt.

Benazir also belonged to the world of the international elite. She was educated at a convent in Karachi, and then at Harvard and Oxford. A photograph of her at college in America in the early 1970s, in T-shirt and jeans, against a dormitory wall bedecked with psychedelic posters, bears out her recollection that she resembled Joan Baez, a folk-singer. At Oxford, she would famously drive to London for American ice-cream in her yellow sports convertible. After her death her many friends recalled her little passions—for slushy novels, for lingerie from Victoria's Secret. Yet she had learned by then no longer to let her dupatta slip in public to leave her head uncovered.

At Oxford, she impressed her father—also an alumnus—by becoming president of the Union, a debating society with a line in leaden sophomoric wit. In one debate, an opponent described her father as “a tradesman of some description. A butcher, I gather.” Benazir looked as if she had been slapped in the face. Her father earned this sobriquet from the slaughter in East Pakistan as Bangladesh struggled to be born. She remembered watching television in disgust as a Pakistani general surrendered, with a hug, to an Indian. Benazir thought he should have shot himself instead.

That was her third world: Pakistani patriot, centre-left populist, democrat and ruthless politician. Like India's Indira Gandhi, Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, she risked and suffered much to fulfil her father's legacy. She endured grim years in detention after her father's death. Both her brothers died unnaturally—the younger one in a mysterious poisoning in France, the elder in a murder in Pakistan for which her husband Asif was charged (and exonerated) but some family members still blame her.

Freed, Benazir went into exile in London, then returned home to a tumultuous welcome in 1986. Two years later, after Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane dropped out of the sky, she was elected to power. For a while, it seemed that the country could put its many troubled years of military rule behind it, and look forward to a democratic future.

But the hopes Benazir had aroused were swiftly disappointed. Her regime was marked by human-rights abuses, incompetence and massive corruption. Mr Zardari became known as Mr 10%. Ousted in 1990 and re-elected in 1993, she was again dismissed in 1996 by the president. Mr Zardari was jailed and she retreated back into exile to escape corruption charges. From there she watched her successor and nemesis, Nawaz Sharif, fall to the Musharraf coup in 1999, and saw Mr Musharraf become an important American ally after September 11th 2001.

There was, however, still a role for Benazir. America saw her as the best way of putting a democratic face on a military dictatorship, so it helped broker the agreement that saw her return to Pakistan in October to fight elections due in January. Islamist militants threatened to kill her. Scores died in a suicide-bombing on the day of her homecoming. Yet she kept campaigning. Vain, selfish and perhaps foolish, Benazir was also very, very brave.

After her assassination, a handwritten will was produced. Foreseeing her own untimely end, it bequeathed her party, like the dynastic heirloom it has become, to her husband, who said he would pass leadership to their 19-year-old son. For a woman who claimed to be driven by a burning desire to bring democracy to Pakistan, it was a curious legacy.