The delay hardly came as a surprise. Many hold the Musharraf-led government responsible for Bhutto’s death, either directly or because of negligence. The sympathy vote for her party, given that she was killed just twelve days before the elections, would have swept it to victory. The PPP’s electoral alliance with PML-N also challenges the PML-Q, the “king’s party” that has ruled the country with the military’s backing for the past five years. The rise of public anger against the PML-Q, as evident in its electoral posters and banners being torn down and damaged all over the country, made it clear that the party would have a hard time at the polls.

The Q League has attempted to regain ground through subsequently published newspaper advertisements that blatantly attempt to use the post-assassination riots and destruction to foment ethnic strife. The undoubtedly tragic loss of lives and property during the post-assassination chaos has also provided the administration an excuse to target the PPP by registering thousands of cases against their workers and electoral candidates (500,000, according to some newspaper reports) in Sindh.

Meanwhile, there is great public indignation at how the government dealt with the assassination — quickly hosing down the scene of the crime, just as it had done after the October 18 attack on Bhutto’s welcome procession, then claiming that “Al-Qaeda” carried out the attack, followed by the ridiculous “sun-roof” theory that the caretaker prime minister had to subsequently apologise for.

The attempt to pin the blame on Al-Qaeda omits the historic and widely known linkage between these “agencies” and the “Taliban” or Al-Qaeda that Benazir herself believed was still alive, a sort of “state within a state”. This linkage has caused great damage not only to the world but also to us here in Pakistan. Following the first attempt on her life the day she returned to Pakistan after almost nine years of self-exile on October 18, Benazir herself accused that these “remnants of Zia”, as she put it, attempted to kill her. In an email made public since her death, she named three people from among these remnants as being behind this attempt: an intelligence chief and two political leaders from the “king’s party”.

The Zia reference stems from events almost three decades ago, when America and other countries propped up another military dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq who seized power in a military coup of 1977 and led Pakistan as a front-line state against the war on Communism in neighbouring Afghanistan. Zia hanged Bhutto’s father, the elected prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in 1979 on trumped-up murder charges. The young Benazir spent five years in prison, and was later exiled. She was finally allowed to return when the Afghan war was over and the world began pressuring Zia towards democracy.

Zia’s death in a mid-air explosion in 1988 sparked off spontaneous street celebrations because of his repressive policies and his handing over of Pakistan to the forces of religious extremism. To many of us, Benazir Bhutto represented hope against these forces — despite accusations that her government had encouraged the Taliban during her second stint as prime minister.

As the world’s first Muslim woman prime minister, Bhutto was also a role model for the youth, especially women. Now, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, a Pakistani school girl could reply: “a prime minister.” Not that Bhutto was an ordinary Pakistani woman. She was the daughter of an elected prime minister, hailing from a powerful and wealthy feudal family. Within these identities, there were multiple contradictions — starting with her identity as a woman. At the end of the day she was the best hope for democracy in Pakistan, representing the aspirations of millions for liberal politics in the country. She paid the ultimate price for her insistence on engaging with such politics.

Her assassination has dealt these aspirations a severe blow. But as her son Bilawal bravely said in his press conference in London on January 9, “Pakistan has lost its best hope for democracy, but not its only hope.” If her assassination does finally draw attention to the dangers posed by a “state within the state” that she herself had drawn attention to, we can still hope for a better future.

The writer is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Karachi

beena.sarwar@gmail.com