“Here people know her as a beautiful and courageous woman who wanted a better future for her people.”

They all pretend to want ‘a better future for the people’. Let’s not be naive and turn Bhutto into the saint and the savior that she was definitely not. I’m not happy with her death for sure but fact is that her own reigns as prime minister in the late ’80s and ’90s were characterised by extreme corruption, clan politics and ego wars with soap opera proporions, and mismanagement.

She was no ‘new political wind’, but rather an exponent of a rotten political culture that eventually paved the way for Musharaf’s coup d’état in 1999 and for ‘religious radicalisation’. The whole Benazir myth was basically created by the glamour press and liberal salons who assumed that a Western-educated woman in power in a Muslim country automatically stands for ‘better governance’.