HYDERABAD: Silver Jubilee Durbar

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Constitutional Crisis. Today Indians, royal and otherwise, are just beginning under a new Constitution (TIME, Jan. 11 et ante} to edge up to the head of India's table for the first time since the Empire was set up. Among ways of wrecking this Constitution would be for the ruling Indian potentates to refuse to sign the Act of Accession intended to bring their States into the new All-India Federation. Last year the Maharaja of Patiala, longtime chairman of the Chamber of Princes, re-signed rather than continue his role of being more or less Britain's whip over his fellow Princes. In the secrecy of their courts and councils last week India's ruling Princes tensely and suspiciously watched the Indian elections. Strongest figure on the princely stage was the Nizam of Hyderabad's trusty Sir Akbar Hydari, firm demanding of the British Raj virtual amendment of the new Constitution by insertion in the Act of Accession, presenting for the signature of His Exalted Highness and other native rulers, such ultrasafe clauses as: "Nothing in this instrument affects the continuance of my Sovereignty in and over this State."

In Hyderabad the native government is real, it is earnest, and the life of His Exalted Highness is much involved with projects of irrigation, soil conservation, the anxieties of how much in the way cotton piece goods is imported from Japan rather than England, modernization of the Hyderabad State Railways and the still somewhat novel issues raised by electricity. The words on a modernistic building of which Hyderabad is proud are not in native characters but read "POWER STATION" (see cut, above), and the Nizam has promised communal radio sets to every town and village.

The cash Silver Jubilee gifts to the Nizam of Hyderabad, by his subjects were expected this week to total at least $1,000,000.