Despite the blemishes of the Emergency, she was in many ways a different woman.

Two: Winston Churchill used to call democracy “the worst system of government in the world” — always adding the rider “except all those other systems”! But Zulfikar Bhutto (Benazir’s father) always used to say, it was the worst of all systems, without Churchill’s rider. Piloo Mody had gone to visit Bhutto (who was his friend) when he was in prison in Pakistan awaiting a sentence of death for murder, a murder of which it was widely believed he was innocent. He told me on his return that Bhutto nostalgically recalled “the noise and chaos of Indian democracy”, regretting that he had made fun of it in the hey-day of his political power. The noise and chaos of Parliamentary democracy, he told Piloo, had a certain vitality; it had the strength and safety of numbers. No citizen’s fate depended on the whims or dispensation of one man or woman — Bhutto was right.

This is why I agree that a modern nation does need democracy and also needs its politicians, “however clumsy, corrupt, effete and power-crazed” they may be!