During the mid-1970s, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's imposition of the Emergency, India entered a period where civil liberties were suspended and much of the political opposition was jailed.

Behind this authoritarian curtain, her Congress party government quietly began reimagining the country - not as a democracy rooted in checks and balances, but as a centralised state governed by command and control, historian Srinath Raghavan reveals in his new book.

In Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India, Prof Raghavan shows how Gandhi's top bureaucrats and party loyalists began pushing for a presidential system - one that would centralise executive power, sideline an "obstructionist" judiciary and reduce parliament to a symbolic chorus.

Inspired in part by Charles de Gaulle's France, the push for a stronger presidency in India reflected a clear ambition to move beyond the constraints of parliamentary democracy - even if it never fully materialised.

It all began, writes Prof Raghavan, in September 1975, when BK Nehru, a seasoned diplomat and a close aide of Gandhi, wrote a letter hailing the Emergency as a "tour de force of immense courage and power produced by popular support" and urged Gandhi to seize the moment.

Parliamentary democracy had "not been able to provide the answer to our needs", Nehru wrote. In this system the executive was continuously dependent on the support of an elected legislature "which is looking for popularity and stops any unpleasant measure".

What India needed, Nehru said, was a directly elected president - freed from parliamentary dependence and capable of taking "tough, unpleasant and unpopular decisions" in the national interest, Prof Raghavan writes.

The model he pointed to was de Gaulle's France - concentrating power in a strong presidency. Nehru imagined a single, seven-year presidential term, proportional representation in Parliament and state legislatures, a judiciary with curtailed powers and a press reined in by strict libel laws. He even proposed stripping fundamental rights - right to equality or freedom of speech, for example - of their justiciability.

Nehru urged Indira Gandhi to "make these fundamental changes in........

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