Princely states of Pakistan

The princely states of Pakistan (Urdu: پاکستان کی نوابی ریاستیں) were former princely states of the British Indian Empire which acceded to the new Dominion of Pakistan between 1947 and 1948, following its independence.

With the withdrawal of the British from the Indian subcontinent, in August 1947, the Indian Independence Act provided that the hundreds of princely states which had existed alongside but outside British India were released from all their subsidiary alliances and other treaty obligations to the British, while at the same time the British withdrew from their treaty obligations to defend the states and keep the peace. The rulers were left to decide whether to accede to one of the newly independent states of India or Pakistan (both formed initially from the British possessions) or to remain independent outside both. Only two rulers acceded to Pakistan in the first month of its independence, August 1947, while the others considered what to do, but most of those states with a Muslim majority population had acceded to Pakistan within a year, prompted in several cases by the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. That conflict was precipitated by the major exception to the destiny of Muslim-majority states: the ruler of Kashmir and Jammu, Hari Singh, himself a Hindu and a former member of the Imperial War Cabinet, kept his state outside both new Dominions until events persuaded him to accede not to Pakistan but to India.

The Instruments of Accession made available for the rulers to sign transferred only limited powers to the Dominion of Pakistan, namely external relations, defence, and communications; in most cases signing was believed to leave the states in the position they had had under the suzerainty of the British Crown. The Wali of Swat commented that the states' accession "did not change very much". However, within a generation all of the princely states had lost their internal autonomy. The last to fall were Hunza and Nagar, in October 1974.

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