On my first evening in Lahore, I dined with friends in a beautiful, old-fashioned drawing room warmed by gas heaters but filled with sadness. There were people, old and young, and everyone talked only of Benazir Bhutto. They remembered that she had her flaws, she could have governed better, done more for women, she could have done more to control her husband’s grasping ways, but in the end everyone agreed that she was the best possible leader for Pakistan.

Those who knew her personally remembered that she was generous, forgiving and the best of friends. Those who knew her only as a public figure remembered that she symbolized what Pakistan would like to be. “She was a true liberal and modern and she spent the best years of her youth in jail so committed was she to the cause of democracy.”

While we talked, Musharraf’s first press conference since Benazir’s assassination was telecast live from Islamabad. He was introduced by a smarmy government official who made it sound as if the journalists were being done a huge favour to be given an audience by the country’s President. But the ex-military ruler looked shaken up and unsure and was defensive in his answers. There was a trace of his old, bumptiousness when he said more than once that he was known always to speak the truth. From his early days in the army, he said, they talked of me as someone who speaks bluntly. The journalists were mostly Western and represented important international newspapers and television networks and they asked hard questions. He answered defensively as if aware of the need to clarify that his government cannot be charged with being behind the assassination.

... contd.