Restore the Princes?

On Pakistan’s thirteen princely states, and what was abolished with them

1. Why did Swat work and Dir fail under the same institution?
2. What filled Swat’s courts after 1969?
3. Can privilege be given function without giving it rule?
4. Should Pakistan restore its princes?

The abolitions

Thirteen states by the standard count came to Pakistan at Partition, and the republic dissolved them in stages. One Unit swallowed Bahawalpur, Khairpur and the Balochistan states in October 1955. The Dir, Chitral and Swat Regulation ended the frontier states in July 1969. Bhutto merged Hunza and Nagar in 1974, and in March 1972, watching Indira abolish India’s privy purses by constitutional amendment, he issued the Rulers of Acceding States (Abolition of Privy Purses and Privileges) Order, P.O. 15 of 1972.

The Friday Times records the scene at the rulers’ meeting with Bhutto. Someone gestured at the Nawab of Bahawalpur and said, Mulk chalaney kai liye paisa bhi is ne diya tha. He gave the money to run this country. It was true; Sadiq Muhammad Khan V had lent the newborn state its working capital. Bhutto conceded lifetime pensions and the ruling houses passed into private life.

So Pakistan ran the same experiment as India, a few months behind.

Swat against Dir

Swat State was founded in 1915 by a jirga that had thrown off the Nawab of Dir; the state’s very existence was a verdict on its neighbour’s rule. Under Miangul Jahanzeb, Wali from 1949, the state built three colleges, thirty-six high schools, thirty middle schools and over two hundred and seventy primary schools in twenty years. On the independent record, literacy ran higher in Swat, for girls as well as boys, than elsewhere in the country, and its qazi courts settled cases in days. Next door, the Nawabs of Dir kept schools and roads out of the state on the standard account, education being the one import a ruler of that mind could not survive, and Ayub deposed the Nawab in 1960.

Same institution, same paramountcy, same decade, opposite outcomes.

The Royal vacuum & Kalat

Swat’s merger in 1969 replaced the Wali’s fortnight justice with Pakistan’s courts under the PATA regulations, and the backlog grew for twenty years. In 1990 the Peshawar High Court struck the regulations down, and into the legal void stepped Sufi Muhammad’s TNSM, demanding sharia courts for a population that had lived with fast religious courts within living memory. TNSM became Fazlullah, Fazlullah became the emirate of 2007, and when the Taliban sold themselves to Swat in 2008 their promise, in terms, was a return to the golden era of the Wali.

Kalat is the other failure. The Khan acceded in March 1948 under circumstances Pakistani official history calls persuasion and Baloch history calls coercion, his brother Abdul Karim was in revolt within months, and the insurrection has recurred in every generation since. Swat shows abolition without replacement; Kalat shows abolition experienced as annexation. Between them they account for a remarkable share of Pakistan’s internal emergencies since 1947.

The secure Monarch argument

Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, has the most developed modern case for monarchy. His claim is not that kings are wise. It is that insecure power is what predates: a ruler who may lose everything loots while he can, and a ruler whose position is safe has the incentives of an owner, long horizons, low time preference, maintenance over extraction. Secure the sovereign and you dissolve the motive for misrule.

The princely record is a clean test, because the Raj made every throne secure. Paramountcy guaranteed the rulers against their subjects; no jirga could remove the Nawab of Dir. And under identical security, Swat built two hundred and seventy schools while Dir refused to build any. Security turns out to be permissive, not productive.

What the model misses, the Wali’s own circumstances supply. Swat’s throne began accountable, elected by jirga in 1915 and confirmed in 1917, and it governed its whole life under the shadow of merger, performance being the standing argument for the state’s survival.

My own test for any government, royal or republican, is that it holds the acquiescence of seventy per cent and keeps the street protests below two per cent, and the scholarly anchor for the second number is Chenoweth’s finding that, in her data, no campaign reaching sustained participation of three and a half per cent has failed. The Wali passed that test for twenty years. Dir’s Nawab failed it and fell to Ayub. Secure princes can be good; only accountable ones reliably are.

The case against

The objection with teeth is not administrative, it is as our favourite commentator put on this blog last week: Pakistan’s curse is feudal domination, and restoring nawabs is refeudalisation with pageantry. The JAAC is marching in Azad Kashmir against elite privilege as I write this.

The answer the record gives is that abolition did not de-elite Pakistan; it changed which elites. The republic that dissolved thirteen ruling houses has since grown a military estate with its own foundations, housing authorities and industries, electoral dynasties that pass constituencies from father to son more reliably than any gaddi ever passed, and commercial houses whose fortunes are settled with the garrison rather than tested in any market. Every republic manufactures aristocracies; the honest question is which ones, holding what, answerable to whom. On that test a custodial prince with a public duty and no writ compares rather well with a housing authority that answers to nobody.

There is also the army. A prince with real power is either Rawalpindi’s rival or Rawalpindi’s client, which is why restoration of rule is dead on arrival and always will be. And Kalat is off this table entirely; in Balochistan any talk of restoring powers reads as secession.

Constitutionalism

Which is why the serious proposal is the narrow one, and the working model is Malaysian. Nine hereditary rulers survived decolonisation there, constitutionally embedded: a Conference of Rulers, a kingship rotating among them on five-year terms, each sultan the head of Islam and custom in his own state, none of them governing. When the monarchy overreached, the 1993 crisis clipped royal immunity and kept the function.

Same indirect-rule genealogy as Pakistan’s states, same religion, federal, and alive.

Pakistan has the pieces on the board already. Salahuddin Abbasi has been ceremonial Amir of Bahawalpur since 1988 and has led the campaign to restore Bahawalpur as a province since 2011, in a South Punjab whose Bahawalpur districts run poverty above forty-five per cent, nearly double the provincial average. A Bahawalpur province with the Amir as constitutional figurehead restores a federal unit, not a throne, and every party has promised the province in some form since 2018. Swat’s Miangul house already supplies the republic with governors and parliamentarians; a custodial role over the valley’s heritage and its dispute-resolution prestige formalises what the Taliban proved the population still wanted. Chitral’s ceremonial Mehtar holds the role now and spends it writing history.

Power not Luxury

The abolition of 1972 took function and left luxury, which is the exact inversion of what a wise republic would have done. The repair is not thrones. It is giving the houses back their work, under constitutions, on the Malaysian pattern, starting where a custodian is already standing beside a live provincial demand (Pakistan meanwhile still pays a maintenance allowance to the Nawab of Junagadh, ruler of a state it has never governed, because the claim on the map requires a prince to hold it).