Tag: Balochistan

Restore the Princes?

August 1, 2026 9 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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Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States

July 9, 2026 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

The useful conversations at a conference are never in the room. They happen in the corridor, over bad coffee, among the people who did not get a panel.

What we heard there over the weekend was a single proposition, stated with varying degrees of anger. The subcontinent is held down by two post-imperial states, each of which inherited the Raj’s administrative logic and neither of which has any intention of loosening it. The languages, the peoples, the small nations inside the big ones are being quietly extinguished. The activists who said this were Baloch, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi (as well as Pushtun, Hazara, and Urdu-speaking).

We should also say at the outset that this essay is about Pakistan. The two-hegemon frame is the activists’ frame, and we have not necessarily adopted it.

I. Ethnicity versus the Pakistani state.

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Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

June 23, 2026 230 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

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Pakistani Diversity

April 29, 2026 1 Comment filed under X.T.M

Q’s comment, on Kabir’s excellent post, deserves to be reproduced in full.

Several points are wrong here:

I have never actually met a Pakistani who thinks they are Arab or Turk ethnically. Claiming lineage is not ethnicity, not even the Syeds identify with Arabs although they will try to flex their Syed status occassionally. Many Syeds in the family, never heard anyone claim they were ethnically Arab.

Ergutral did not make people in Pakistan think they were Turks, what they identified with was the Islamic history and mannerisms being portrayed. A pasthun guy told me that it portrayed ‘our history’ and while I completely understdood the ‘our’ part because he was using it in an Islamic context (because he is a proud Pasthun, not Arab or Turk), but I did correct him that it was mostly fiction. Continue reading Pakistani Diversity

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