Tragedy dogs the Bhuttos as it does the Gandhis. The crucial difference is that while India’s political system can absorb shocks without being derailed, Pakistan lurches from crisis to crisis, depending on individuals to rescue and hold together the tattered remains of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s dream of a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Benazir Bhutto is the fourth Pakistani leader to meet a violent end. She is also the fourth in her family to suffer that fate. Her own recent pronouncements, especially in interviews before returning to Pakistan, suggested sombre intimations of mortality. She understood the nature of the beast she was taking on. She had a foretaste of death in October when bombs ravaged her motorcade in Karachi, killing 139 people. “A democrat cannot afford to worry about the consequences of a bomb if she has to fight terror,” she told an Oxford friend. “If I am to die, I will die.”

Pakistan’s usual knee-jerk reaction to such a crisis is the immediate imposition of martial law and state of emergency, not merely the three days of mourning Islamabad has prescribed. But a rigorous official response might present difficulties this time since Pervez Musharraf has only just shed his uniform so that Pakistan can appear to take a small faltering step towards democratic elections. The next step depends as much on him as on his hand-picked successor as army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The joint decision will be designed to ensure the continued domination of the landowning, business and military elite that felt deeply threatened by Benazir’s populism and the mass support that her father’s Pakistan People’s Party still enjoys.

Religious fundamentalism thus serves the material purpose of a very secular power elite. Whether the taliban, al-Qaida or some local variant of the same shadowy, sinister force was responsible for the murder, it sought to maintain the status quo in Pakistani life. Whatever the Musharraf-Kayani duo announces will also, of course, reflect the considered view of the American state department which uses Pakistan as its pawn on a much bigger chequerboard.

This time round Benazir was widely seen to enjoy American blessings. She had been anointed not quite to take over the government but to carry the Pakistani masses into some kind of coalition arrangement with Musharraf in the guise of civilian president. Such an alliance was expected to give pause to the talibanization of a nuclear-armed Pakistan. It would also bestow a semblance of democracy on a key ally in the United States of America’s supposed crusade to bring democracy to selected — not all — areas of the Islamic world. Iraq and Afghanistan are high on the list of favoured recipients, not Saudi Arabia or the gulf sheikhdoms. But as always with Asian politicians, those blessings were the kiss of death. Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah of Iran showed the way.

It would be futile to imagine that the shock waves of Benazir’s death can be arrested by the knife that Cyril Radcliffe, an old Haileyburian and Clement Attlee’s school chum, plunged into the Punjab heartland. His award dragged the bleeding knife through thickly populated townships and verdant fields, cutting villages into two and even slicing private houses, leaving some rooms in one country and others in the other. The Radcliffe Line is yet another political border that savages the flesh without dividing the spirit.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Speak no ill of the dead. But, as M.K. Narayanan pointed out the other day, Benazir, courageous as she was, was not a particular friend of India. What the national security adviser did not say was that no ruler of Pakistan is. Or can be. Instinct is one factor. Political opportunism another. The circumstances of Partition were such that Pakistan must forever justify its existence in contradistinction to India. It must always strive to be the subcontinent’s Other. Abandoning the pretence of Jinnah’s original homeland claim almost at birth, Pakistan eagerly embraced in 1947 the American raison d’être of being a more attractive alternative to India in the global power game.

The Americans bestowed many roles on Pakistan, some contradicting others. Pakistan would contain Soviet and Chinese communism, Pakistan would lead the way to a rapprochement with China, Pakistan would help to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan, Pakistan would install a favourable (read taliban) regime in Kabul. After 9/11, Pakistan would help to eject the taliban and remould feudal tribalism in the crucible of a democracy that it had rejected at home. For 60 years therefore, Pakistan has had little independent political life of its own: it has been the frontline state for American global ambitions. Enjoying autonomy within that paradigm, its leaders were free to try and destabilize India, an objective that did not then interfere with the US’s superpower calculations. It makes little difference to us, therefore, whether Musharraf continues to suppress his people with an iron hand or whether a Bhutto or a Nawaz Sharif prospers in the one profession that demands no qualifications and sets no standards but holds the promise of untold wealth and power.

I remember the flicker of hope in 1958 when Ayub Khan seized power. The political pundits in India and Britain at once predicted a reconciliation with India. A military dictator would not have to play to the gallery for votes, they said, and would therefore agree to a reasonable settlement on Kashmir. They were soon proved wrong. Improving on Pakistani instinct, Ayub also expanded and enlarged the directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence to safeguard security, monitor the opposition and sustain military rule. It has been said repeatedly since then that no matter who wins a Pakistani election, the real victor remains the ISI. It must not be forgotten that Kayani, the new army chief, was formerly ISI director. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change the more they are the same.

Benazir’s introduction to subcontinental politics, indeed, to politics of any kind, was through deception and duplicity. As a 19-year-old girl, she accompanied her father to Simla in June 1972 when he reportedly upstaged Indira Gandhi. By securing the repatriation of the 93,000 Pakistani troops who had surrendered in Bangladesh, he returned home a caesar who had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. He developed the entente with China with the vow that Pakistanis would eat grass or leaves but would not be deterred from making the nuclear bomb so as never again to suffer defeat at India’s hands...which it did. And to attain his goal, he fobbed off his hostess with the soon-to-be-repudiated promise to convert the line of control in Kashmir to an international border.

Bhutto cannot be blamed for hoodwinking India to further his own national interest. But the episode deserves to be remembered in all negotiations with Pakistan and in all assessments of Pakistani leaders, whether politicians or brass hats. His glamorous daughter’s public projection was always more convincing than her hold on governance. She won Pakistan’s first democratic election in 11 years. She was good at whipping up support in west Asia, lobbying American Congressmen for F-16s or have Pakistan removed from the terrorist-sponsoring nation list, and screaming about a plebiscite in Kashmir. But the senior George Bush and the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency had to treat her to a presentation on Pakistan’s bomb before she was convinced of what her army and the ISI were up to behind her back.

India has no especial cause for grief at this particular death. But the manner of dying is profoundly saddening, as is the prospect of violence overwhelming civilized statecraft. A Pakistan in disarray can only add to India’s worries, especially if the disarray is the murderous handiwork of fanatical jihadists whose upsurge must play some part in encouraging a counter-response in India.