You have to experience Pakistan’s street politics to understand how chaotic and dangerous it can be. Ours has mellowed hugely in comparison. At the best of times, a popular politician in Pakistan takes huge physical risks. Crowds, chaos, din, drums and dust, just the raw energy of the Pakistani street leaves India far behind. Perhaps it is because of the spasmodic nature of that democratic process, each rally is some kind of mass catharsis. Or, perhaps, as a Pakistan journo once told me, “It is just that we are a mostly Punjabi nation.”

But in so many years of covering politics, I have never seen such a crowd, so much energy, noise, dust and adrenalin as while following Benazir from Lahore airport when she returned from exile in the summer of 1986. It was the first time ever that I was lost. I, who had seen so much chaos from Indira Gandhi’s rallies to JP Narayan’s and the mass defiance of curfew by a million people in Guwahati. After an hour, I had no idea where I was, my shirt was torn. My face and head were covered in dust like everybody else’s but nobody seemed to mind. For a nation starved of any democracy for nearly a decade, this was a moment to savour.

And the frail, then 35-year-old, who had brought it to them, the freedom of the street, the safety of numbers, and hence the courage to shout slogans against Zia and America, stood for those hours — in that dust storm — on top of a totally unprotected open truck. The truck was to become her campaign vehicle for ever.

... contd.