PAKISTAN has just completed one full year without Benazir Bhutto. Until that fateful moment of December 27, 2007 -- when she was callously murdered outside Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh, a murder whose mystery hasn't been solved to date despite her party being in power for nearly as long — Pakistanis had gotten so used to seeing her as a compulsory player on their political chess-board that many of them still find it hard to believe she's no longer around to call the shots.

That Benazir Bhutto was popular among her countrymen could easily go without saying. And it wasn't that she didn't deserve the title of the brightest star on Pakistan's political firmament, besides being a globally prominent political figure of her times. Indeed a career in politics was ingrained in her genes and fate and circumstances ordained her to don the mantle of leadership in a country that wasn't, exactly, known to take kindly to its political leaders until she appeared on the scene to write a new script.

But it would be unfair to her memory to insist that a political career was as much a bequest to her from her pedigree as was the wealth she inherited. The fact is that few politicos in Pakistan's arcane politics had worked as hard as she did to become a public idol and command a following and respect that even paled her father's legacy of a populist leader, par excellence.

She was unprepared to step into her father's shoes — and they were big shoes by any definition of politics — when the torch of the PPP was passed on to her after the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The canny Bhutto had, no doubt, seen to it that his first-born was tutored in the finest universities his money could afford.

But good education and politics are not, necessarily, the best bed-fellows, especially when implanted in Pakistan's basically feudal political culture. But BB learnt it quite early in her salad days in politics what it takes to strike a harmonious chord with the people of Pakistan to be acceptable to them rather than being part of the feudal circuit.

In the art of endearing herself to the masses, BB excelled even her father who, despite being a consummate politician and master of dissemblance masquerading as man-of-the-masses, could never, truly, become one of them. In spite of his proven charisma, ZAB lacked that mystique, which BB had in spades, to become a genuinely populist leader.

Her being a woman inheriting the mantle of a fallen hero helped her a lot. The feudal culture may be callous to women in dispensing social justice to them. However, the feudal instinct induces men to be deferential to women who may appear bold and resolute and may have also made an impression of sorts on them. Benazir had feudal blood in her veins and she had also inherited boldness from her prodigious father. So she made excellent use of this broth to mark her own, decisive, imprint on the political landscape of Pakistan.

She launched herself in Pakistani politics by picking up the standard of her father. There was a huge vacuum at the top of PPP — left by the contrived demise of ZAB and the fact that none of the acolytes from his halcyon days had the guts to even make an attempt to pick up the pieces of a party in total disarray. She filled that void. Yet, there was a basic difference between ZAB and his daughter.

ZAB tilted at all the windmills to convince the people of Pakistan that he was a messiah of the poor and the disenfranchised. He succeeded only partially in that mission the politically naïve simpletons among the teeming millions may have come to accept his great dissemblance act for being genuine. But to the discerning and well-informed, ZAB could never live out of his feudal skin, much as he may have strived to sell himself as Quaid-e-Awam ( a leader of the masses). ZAB was a wadera — a feudal baron — to his bone-marrow. His Himalayan arrogance rendered him uncompromising, combative and reckless even to his last breath, and for this he was made to pay hubris' ultimate price.

Benazir, in contrast, was made of a much softer and more humane stuff. She may have, unconsciously, been close to matching her father's arrogance in her first stint in office. However, those, like this scribe, who had an opportunity to see her operate in her both stints as PM, could see the humility content of character welling up, markedly, in her second term. That was symptomatic of her ability to learn from experience, something that ZAB's hubris wouldn't allow him to. The adversity of forced exile seemed to mellow her even further and make her a conciliatory politician rather than a combative one like ZAB.

Ironically, her learning curve — the willingness to compromise and cut deals with adversaries in the interest of extending her political career and fortunes — may have led to her premature demise.

As everybody knew, she had returned to Pakistan, in October 2007, because of a deal with Musharraf that paved the way for her political comeback as well as the rehabilitation of her much-tainted and sullied spouse. Forces beyond Pakistan had removed the kinks between her and Bonaparte Musharraf. They were both expected to play according to the ground rules and parameters delineated by their overseas mentor or mentors.

However, upon her re-acquaintance with the ground realities of Pakistan she quickly changed her tune, to the utter discomfiture and annoyance of the deal-makers and string-pullers.

To this scribe, BB's fate was sealed the day she went up to the outer walls of the house in Islamabad's Judges Colony — where Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was incarcerated along with his family under Musharraf- proclaimed 'emergency' — and declared, in no uncertain and forthright terms, that Justice Chaudhry was her CJ and would be rehabilitated once she was in power.

That CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry is still in a limbo is the most convincing evidence of the current ruling dispensation's callous digression from what BB had in mind for a democratic Pakistan when she so resolutely went out on a limb to insist on the rule of law — a primordial requisite for democracy being safe in a society.

It's a cruel irony that those who have risen to power in her name, and on the strength of the mandate given by the people of Pakistan in her memory, are doing exactly the opposite of how she was, generally, expected to govern and fashion a democratic and progressive Pakistan.

Asif Ali Zardari has been routinely paying lip service to the legacy of his slain spouse but doing everything that she would have abhorred had she lived to govern Pakistan. Zardari today is more powerful than Musharraf, the man he toppled in what could only be described as a 'palace coup,' ever was. He has not only inherited all the powers that Musharraf had so jealously chaperoned under his wings but has clearly also usurped the powers of PM from an incumbent who, mildly put, seems lost in the corridors of power.

In a somewhat crude and botched parody of how ZAB ruled over Pakistan at the pinnacle of his power, Zardari is promoting the role of cronies in his dictatorial style of governance, just the way ZAB had made his canopy of power a refuge of the feudal barons. But there's a yawning difference in the quality of leadership between ZAB and his faltering son-in-law the former was known for the brilliance of his mind and superb political sense, while the less said of these departments about the latter the better. The only thing where Zardari may perhaps come close to ZAB is in their guile and cunning.

Ironically, too, Musharraf might also have good reason to regret the cruel hand of death that struck BB. Had she lived, he might still be the president, though, most likely denuded and shorn of much of his erstwhile power, which would still be a good bargain for him. But with the demise of Benazir, Musharraf's utility also went bust for his mentors that had promoted him all those years as a strong man. To fill those shoes, they found a more willing and obliging client to do their bidding without demur. Musharraf must rue the fact that he paved the way, with his NRO, for the likes of Zardari to challenge him at his turf and, ultimately, disengage him from his umbilical chord.

No wonder Pakistanis of all stripes and colours are at one that things would have been different, quite different, in Pakistan today had Benazir survived the assassin's bullet. At the very least, Pakistan under her would have been a more open, a more democratic and a more law-abiding country.

It would have been a less fractious and bloody society with its social structure's fault lines not so menacingly exposed. How they must wish for all this, if only they could turn the clock back to where it was before that fateful hour of her tragic death.

The writer is a former ambassador.

E-mail k_k_ghori@yahoo.com