内容摘要：Reform UK finished third with 7,088 votes, following a campaign that attracted criticism

Reform UK finished third with 7,088 votes, following a campaign that attracted criticism

He has denied any involvement in the farmer's disappearance.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

, 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.In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as "one of the world's most prolific drug traffickers".

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals - and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.His status in the underworld earned him the moniker "the Sultan".

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs - including enough heroin for "millions of doses" - into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.