Restore the Princes?

August 1, 2026 4 Comments filed under X.T.M

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

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What would Braj Pradesh look like?

July 31, 2026 23 Comments filed under X.T.M

On the states that were never drawn, and the language of Lord Krishna’s own country

  1. Why was the linguistic principle applied everywhere except the Hindi belt?
  2. What would a Braj Pradesh look like, and which is its capital, Agra or Mathura?
  3. Can the languages be scheduled without unseating Hindi?
  4. What did Ambedkar see in 1955?

Good for the South but not the North?

The States Reorganisation Commission redrew the South along language lines and left the North alone. Andhra for Telugu, Kerala for Malayalam, Karnataka for Kannada, and one enormous Uttar Pradesh for a “Hindi” that contains multitudes. Ambedkar read the report and wrote a pamphlet, Thoughts on Linguistic States, published in December 1955. His verdict: the Commission had produced “a consolidation of the North and balkanisation of the South“, and intentionally or not, the fact was there.

His remedy was specific. Divide UP into three states of roughly two crore each, capitals at Meerut, Cawnpore and Allahabad. Divide Bihar in two, capitals at Patna and Ranchi. “The idea of having bigger linguistic states is not a democratic idea at all,” he wrote, and he added the detail that pre-empts the obvious objection: each of the resulting states would still have Hindi as its language. Division did not threaten Hindi. Forty-five years later, southern Bihar became Jharkhand with its capital at Ranchi, exactly as drawn.

In November 2011 Mayawati’s assembly passed a resolution splitting UP into four, Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Awadh Pradesh and Paschim Pradesh, and sent it to Delhi. The UPA let it die. Uttar Pradesh today holds over 240 million people, which would rank it around the fifth largest country on earth, under one Vidhan Sabha.

The Hindi umbrella

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In Ruchira’s Honour

July 30, 2026 8 Comments filed under X.T.M

Ruchira’s daughter Sanjukta shared my tribute on Facebook this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog, and that a stranger’s grief could reach her family and land as comfort is the whole case for keeping BP alive. The original post is here, Ruchira’s obituary is here, and her daughter’s own tribute is here.

Rest in peace, dearest Ruchira.

In her honour I have started using “I” again instead of the impersonal “we”. I wanted to emotionally invest in this space the way she did in her interactions online.

Moments like this are what I want to cultivate here, so, two years after I revived the blog here from Chennai.

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Dharms are Natural Democrats

July 29, 2026 90 Comments filed under X.T.M

On what Britain bequeathed, and what Delhi chose

  1. What did Britain actually leave in 1947, institutions or a franchise?
  2. Whose precedent was universal suffrage in 1950?
  3. Why did the wardrobe never decolonise?
  4. Are all South Asians natural democrats?

The Colonial Bequest

The parliamentary system across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is Westminster’s. The founders, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, were British-trained lawyers. Liberal democracy arrived in the West through revolutions and arrived in South Asia from the top down. Before the British, the subcontinent was ruled by monarchies, and the political parties are still run by royal houses in all but name, the Bhuttos, the Sharifs, the Gandhis. South Asians, on this account, are not natural democrats.

The chamber, the party system, the common law, the drafting language, the Inns of Court on the founders’ CVs are Albion’s gift. The Indian precedents, Chandragupta and Akbar are kings at scale, and pointing at them concedes the monarchy claim rather than rebutting it. The answer sits in the smaller polities.

The Dharmic republics

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The Writ of the Pakistani State into P.A.K

July 28, 2026 144 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Rawalakot vs. Jantar Mantar

  1. Has any other South Asian government fired the anti-national frame at a major protest movement?
  2. What matters, constitutionalism or state resolve?
  3. Can a state be “hard” outwards without treating domestic opposition as an external enemy?

Is this the same as Delhi?

Last night, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Police issued a statement about clashes at Rawalakot. It said that armed groups of the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee had tried to force their way into the city, that appeals to disperse were rejected, that fire was opened on law enforcement officials, and that two officers were injured. The phrase used was challenging the state writ.

Five weeks earlier, on 23 June, Dharmendra Pradhan described the Cockroach Janta Party as a B team of disruptive elements and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

The two governments reached for the same instrument. Both took a movement making material demands and attempted to relocate it outside the nation, where its demands would no longer require an answer. This is the standard subcontinental response to a protest that cannot be conceded to.

The difference is what happened next. The JAAC is now banned. Pradhan resigned on 25 July.

Why is the Pakistani case different?

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The Price of India’s Soul?

July 27, 2026 25 Comments filed under X.T.M

On Great Nicobar, and what integration would actually require

  1. Is the port separable from the township in practice, or only on paper?
  2. Can 229 people hold a veto over a national project? If they cannot, who can?
  3. Does Indian elite capital reinvest at home, and what would it look like if it did?

The Strategic Case

In August 2024 the Public Investment Board, the Finance Ministry body that vets projects with a financial fallout, examined the Great Nicobar proposal brought to it by the Ministry of Shipping. It recorded that the project did not have strategic objectives, and that strategic objectives should be added to it.

They were added. In March 2026 the Ministry of Defence notified the project as strategic. The Hindu has reviewed both the 2024 board documents and the March 2026 records of the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee, the Finance Ministry branch that must clear anything above five hundred crore.

In between, the shipping ministry asked for ₹12,300 crore of viability gap funding. The appraisal committee asked why a commercially viable project required a subsidy, and why the ministry wanted to depart from the funding norms in this case. It also asked how the port would compete with Colombo, Port Klang and Singapore. The funding was refused and the Ports Ministry was told to find the money internally.

Congress Intervenes

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The Cockroach Takes a Bow

July 26, 2026 186 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

On the CJP, the NEET leak, and the weapon that failed to detonate

1. How much of the patriotic framing was strategy and how much was simply the sincere register of the people who happened to be there?

2. Does the Shaheen Bagh comparison hold? The counter-case is that 2020 and 2026 are not comparable because the CAA was a policy the government wanted and the NEET leak was an embarrassment it did not.

3. Can a satirical formation convert?

Sorting out the Cockroaches?

Every major Indian protest movement of the last twelve years has faced the same attempted execution. Not by baton, though the batons come, and came again on 20 July. The execution is attempted when the state tries to answer the question who are these people? before the movement can answer it. Shaheen Bagh was minorities. JNU was tukde-tukde. The farmers held out longest and won their repeal, and were still, in the telling, Khalistanis with tractors.

It is a sorting mechanism. Once a crowd has been sorted out of the nation, its demands become negotiable in the way that a hostile faction’s demands are negotiable, which is to say not at all.

The Cockroach Janta Party won in large part because Abhijeet Dipke understood this and moved first.

The insult

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The Hindufication of the Indian Bahá’í Community

July 25, 2026 No Comments filed under X.T.M

The Bahá’í community of India hosted this performance in Mumbai roughly around about nine years ago, because 2017 was the sacred bicentenary of the birthday of Bahá’u’lláh.

What’s also interesting is that the prayer is translated into Shudd Hindi, whereas the two languages in the world that get the direct translation from the original Persian and Arabic language of the Writings are Persian, Arabic, and Urdu.

It’s interesting that I don’t know where the Shudd Hindi gets translated from: Urdu, Perso-Arabic or English.

I also got this invite today for this very interesting talk below; K might have some interesting views on the below.

Open Thread – Iran & CJP

July 24, 2026 43 Comments filed under X.T.M

I went on Twitter for a bit (I stopped using it) and I was surprised by what’s happening.

The war in Iran seems to be raging and the CJP protests don’t seem to be piping down (yet).

  • What do people think of Sonam Wangchuk?
  • Why doesn’t the Education Minister just resign?
  • The BJP (and especially Modi) have cultivated an aura of invincibility?

I have thoughts but I’ll write on them later on tonight. I commend the Commentariat on VERY high quality exchanges; we don’t all have to agree but when we do so in a calm and measured manner, it yields a lot of fruit.

Also Calvin as captain of the “opposition” is doing after fine job, it’s fairly obviously now that BP is an India-first blog. Pakistan and Diaspora are interesting inasmuch as they impact India’s future, which is bright.

Otherwise, the boundaries of the Sikh Empire essentially map the upper reaches of the Indus watershed. The Sutlej apparently was the Eastern boundary of the Empire.

The Sikh Empire c. 1843 at its greatest territorial extent.

Brown Pundits