Benazir Bhutto was one of several women who were collectively South Asia’s greatest political paradox, each rising to heights of power on the backs of dead husbands and fathers for the sole reason that they possessed famous names.

Bhutto’s ambition and guts were beyond question, but without her name and family political pedigree — and vast wealth — she could not have become the first female leader of a contemporary Muslim country.

It also happened in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where two women who hated each other, Begum Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajid, carved up the political landscape because one was the widow of the liberation war hero against Pakistan and the other the daughter of the founder of the nation. Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the world’s first female head of government in 1960 because her husband had held the job before her — paving the way for their daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, subsequently to become Prime Minister and President.

Indira Gandhi led India because her father was Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sonia Gandhi became political king-maker because she was Rajiv Gandhi’s widow.

Benazir Bhutto rose to power because she was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former populist Prime Minister who was hanged by the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq in 1979.

The dignity with which she handled herself after his judicial assassination — she called it murder — drew admiring comparisons with the Kennedy family, and touched the hearts of a nation sick of austere military rule. Her beauty and powerful oratory caught the imagination, and army rule weakened as her popularity soared.

It was a measure of Bhutto’s political ambition that in 1987 she submitted herself to an arranged marriage to somebody she did not love — the son of a Karachi cinema owner — aware that the highly conservative electorate would not tolerate being led by an unmarried woman. She constantly endured the sometimes salacious taunts of clerics who accused her of dating men while she was studying at Harvard and Oxford.

She was elected leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, founded by her father, and in national elections in November 1988 swept to power. She had returned from exile in London to be cheered by hundreds of thousands of people who were as confident as she was that a new and prosperous era was beginning and that the Army would at last allow democracy to take root.

Never had Pakistan been more optimistic or certain of itself. In less than two years, however, the military engineered Bhutto’s dismissal on the grounds of incompetence and corruption, and a new era of failed democracies and squandered hopes began.

Almost her entire time in her first term of office was spent fighting political battles with clerics and others determined to get her out. There was little opportunity for policymaking or economic planning, and the country reeled in financial crisis as the rich grew richer through corruption. Reports of rampant fraud by her husband, Asif Zardari, sullied the Bhutto name. Downtrodden women and the poor, groups which she had pledged to help, felt betrayed.

Three years after her dismissal, however, following even worse misrule and corruption under the government of Nawaz Sharif — also dismissed at the Army’s behest — she was re-elected Prime Minister. But circumstances did not improve, and nationwide loathing of the antics of Asif Zardari, openly branded “Mr Ten Per Cent” by the press, helped to wreck Bhutto’s credibility at home and abroad.

There was widespread speculation about the obvious power Zardari exercised over his wife, and about her apparently inexplicable refusal to curtail his activities even though they were helping to destroy her credibility and undermine her leadership.