He was an extremely talented man. In much the same way, he was highly contemptuous of everyone else around him. He was Pakistan's first elected leader by default; and during his five years in office he left no stone unturned to demonstrate the authoritarian streak in his personality.

He had the respectable J.A. Rahim, who had with him formed the Pakistan People's Party in November 1967, humiliated by security forces. Another of Bhutto's early allies, Meraj Mohammad Khan, was beaten badly by his goons for speaking out against the excesses of his leader. Bhutto promoted Ziaul Haque to the position of army chief of staff over six senior officers, and then did everything he could to insult him in public. He called him his monkey general.

Twenty-eight years after his sordid death, Bhutto remains a fascinating figure for students of Pakistan's history. He came back home from the West in 1953, a brilliant individual who had graduated in law and seemed destined for an illustrious place in the legal profession. As a student at Oxford, he had impressed a visiting Jawaharlal Nehru with his debating skills. In Pakistan, he employed the same skills teaching his students, until politics took his fancy.

As a friend of Humayun Mirza, the son of Major General Iskandar Mirza, President of Pakistan, Bhutto once suggested to Humayun that the head of state be his guest in Larkana. Humayun Mirza turned down the suggestion, for a president could have no conceivable reason to present himself at the home of a young lawyer who was just a friend of his son's. That did not prevent Bhutto from wangling a meeting with General Mirza at the president's official residence in Karachi. The president ended up being impressed by the smooth-talking young man.

A year later, once Pakistan was placed under the first of its many bouts of martial law, Bhutto, aged thirty, was inducted as a minister in the central government. He wrote an ingratiating letter to Mirza, telling him in unabashed manner that the president's place in Pakistan's history would be greater than that of the country's founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Self-aggrandisement was the guiding principle in Bhutto's life. Contradictions were the hallmark that defined his politics. When Iskandar Mirza was overthrown by General Ayub Khan a mere twenty days after the two men had sent the civilian government packing, Bhutto quickly sidled up to the latter.

He had a genius for comprehending the direction in which the winds would blow. For eight long years, Bhutto served the Ayub Khan regime in a number of ministerial positions, reaching the peaks when, on the death of Mohammad Ali Bogra in early 1963, he was appointed foreign minister.

At one point, with President Ayub Khan serving as leader of the Convention Muslim League, Bhutto became its secretary general. He quickly demonstrated his gratitude through suggesting that Ayub be made president of Pakistan for life.

In 1965, he impressed many Pakistanis, and repelled the rest of the world, with his uncouth behaviour at the United Nations Security Council when he described the Indian representatives led by Sardar Swaran Singh as dogs.

It was behaviour that would be repeated in 1971, when he would tear a copy of a UN resolution to pieces and storm out of the Security Council. Lyndon Johnson once shut him up when he repeatedly interfered with his conversation with a visiting Ayub Khan at the White House. Harold Wilson could not fathom how a man of such malevolence could be a country's foreign minister. Andrei Gromyko studiously ignored him in Tashkent.

In his final days in the Ayub administration, Bhutto went around spreading a systematic web of lies about the Tashkent Declaration the president had signed with Indian premier Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966. A secret clause in the deal, claimed Bhutto, had bartered away Pakistan's rights over Kashmir.

There was no deal, and he knew it. But the untruths he peddled made him popular with Pakistanis impatient to get rid of the field marshal. Bhutto went on leave and would not resign, until Ayub Khan threatened to sack him.

Out of office, he was scared and insecure until other men, all opposed to the dictator, helped him give shape to the PPP. In mid-1968, as political discontent began to take slow but bigger dimensions in East Pakistan, Bhutto dramatically announced his decision to oppose Ayub Khan at the presidential elections scheduled for 1970.

When he was arrested in November of that year, he appeared in court with a piece of meat, one of two he said he had been given for dinner the previous night, clearly with the intent of showing how disgracefully he was being treated in jail. And then he declaimed before the court: "The wheel of fortune will turn; and in the revolution of that turn, a better tomorrow will dawn."

A tomorrow did dawn, but Bhutto made sure that it was not any better than all of Pakistan's yesterdays. His dislike of Bengalis turned out to be pathological. In 1966, when Tajuddin Ahmad took up, on behalf of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto's challenge to a public debate on the Six Points at Dhaka's Paltan Maidan, Bhutto simply did not turn up.

But when the men behind the Six Points won Pakistan's first general election by a convincing majority in December 1970, Bhutto at first tried to weasel his way into what he thought would be a grand coalition with the Awami League. When that did not come to pass, he went back to the army and helped it to take the country down the road to disaster.

Arriving back in Karachi after having watched Dhaka burn in March 1971, he delightedly told the media: "Thank God, Pakistan has been saved." In December of the year, as the generals tried desperately to save their soldiers in Dhaka, Yahya Khan called Bhutto in New York to ask him to accept a Polish resolution for a ceasefire. Bhutto pretended he could not hear the president. A day later, a defeated Pakistan bit the dust in an emergent Bangladesh.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was an avid reader, and missed little opportunity of visiting bookstores wherever he happened to be. He loved beautiful women and enjoyed impressing people with his exercise of power. The modernity in him all too often retreated into the tribal, as his dealings with people in his native Sind would show.

He expected respect from others, but would carefully stay away from according them the same. Theatrics underlined his politics, ultimately to drive holes in it. Moments before his execution, seemingly unable to take in the reality, he told his executioners to take the hood off his face. Seconds later, he was dead.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could have made a positive difference in the lives of millions of people. He did not, for his ambitions, unbridled and unprincipled, came in the way.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.