Whatever Benazir Bhutto's failings as a politician, there was no denying the fact that she was a woman of great courage. This was not necessarily a quality acquired during her two-decade-long participation in the rough and tumble of Pakistani politics. Courage seemed to be in her genes.
I was witness to her physical courage when she first entered politics in the mid-1980s only a few years after her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister, was hanged by the military.
She was 35 years old when she launched her national campaign for the 1988 general election with a 20-hour train journey from Karachi, the sprawling port city in her home province of Sindh, to Lahore, the capital of Punjab province and the citadel of Pakistan's military and bureaucratic ruling elite.
Benazir Bhutto was challenging this elite and seeking to reclaim her father's political legacy. It was soon apparent that she was evoking a tremendous popular response right across Pakistan.
All through the night and the next morning, the train was besieged by hundreds of thousands of frenzied men screaming 'Jiye Bhutto!' (Long live Bhutto!).
I was sitting at the entrance to her railway coach sharing a coupe with a senior Pakistani journalist who was her adviser. At every halt, she would briskly walk past us, and standing unprotected at the narrow entrance door, harangue the massive, uncontrollably excited crowd that swamped not just her coach but the entire train, the platform and even the railway station roof.
