A princely state (also called native state) was a nominally sovereign entity of the British Raj that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by an indigenous ruler under a form of indirect rule, subject to a subsidiary alliance and the suzerainty or paramountcy of the British Crown.
In 1920, the Indian National Congress party under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi declared swaraj (self-rule) for Indians as its goal and asked the princes of India to establish responsible government. Jawaharlal Nehru played a major role in pushing Congress to confront the princely states and declared in 1929 that "the only people who have the right to determine the future of the Princely States must be the people of these States". In 1937, the Congress won in most parts of India (excluding the princely states) in the 1937 state elections, and started to intervene in the affairs of the states. In the same year, Gandhi played a major role in proposing a federation involving a union between British India and the princely states, with an Indian central government. In 1946, Nehru observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India.
