The Telegraph remembers Meghrajji III, the last ruling Maharaja of Dhrangadhra-Halvad, and the last surviving knight of the Order of the Indian Empire.

Meghrajji III was the 45th and last ruling descendant of the Jhala clan of Rajputs, of the Suryavanshi lineage, claiming descent from Surya, the Hindu Sun god. They were a warrior clan who originated in Baluchistan and arrived in India during the eighth century. The clan name derives from a miraculous feat by its founder Harapaldev’s wife, Shaktidevi, who caught up her children through an open window when they were charged by an elephant in must. Jhalvan is Gujarati for ‘catching’ and her children and descendants thus began to be called Jhala.

[I]n 1952, he opted out of what he described as “that rare and gubernatorial prison” for the freedom of a commoner at Christ Church, Oxford. There was some grumbling about his lack of academic qualifications, but he enjoyed the friendship of the House’s senior censor Hugh Trevor-Roper. When it was objected that Raj (as he signed himself in private correspondence) had not done any military service, Trevor-Roper pointed out that he had been commander-in-chief of the Dhrangadhra armed forces for six years.

The prince drove a sky-blue Jaguar at great speed around Oxford, and in 1953 received an invitation to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey. Over a period of six years he read Philosophy, took a diploma in Anthropology, and earned a BLitt with a thesis on the Brahma Samskâras (sacraments) as well as finding time to study drawing at the Ruskin School of Art and design ties as part of his heraldic studies. He also played the flute.

At his parties the champagne flowed freely. Allotted a set of four rooms, he had a retinue that included an ADC, a secretary and two servants dressed in dove-coloured coats and black caps. In deference to his age and position, he was made a member of the senior common room.

Dhrangadhra and his fellow princes had governed 565 states that covered almost half of the subcontinent, and at first they kept themselves aloof in the new republic. But on returning home from Christ Church he found that his fellow former rulers were gradually taking to democratic politics, proving an increasing irritant to the Congress government.

In 1967 he was elected to the legislature in Gujarat, the western Indian state into whose Saurastra peninsular Dhrangadhra-Halvad had been amalgamated. He subsequently became a member of India’s Lok Sabha (the country’s lower house of parliament), where he introduced measures to safeguard the constitutional rights of former rulers, particularly against the proposed abolition of the princes’ titles and their privy purses. Together with the Maharaja of Baroda and the Begum of Bhopal, he led the “concord of princes” which conducted a bitter battle over three years.

Interviewed by Harold Sieve of The Daily Telegraph, Dhrangadhra was agreeable to letting slip princely trappings, but his fellow princes were proud of their titles and didn’t see why they should no longer be permitted to fly their flags on cars while every lorry and taxi driver could do so. There was a brief reprieve when the Constitution Amendment Bill, stripping them of their titles, was declared illegal. As a result parliament was dissolved. But on the day of the subsequent election Dhrangadhra was ill in University College Hospital, London, and narrowly lost his seat.

Under the new government the chief justice was replaced and the Constitution Amendment Bill was reintroduced. After it became law Dhrangadhra was most exasperated by his fellow princes’ failure to back the compromise he had proposed.

Born Mayurdwajsinhji on March 3 1923, his birth was celebrated with the beating of war drums and the release of all Dhrangadhra-Halvad’s prisoners. Although small in comparison with its neighbours, the state comprised 1,157 square miles with a population of about 250,000, and rated a 13-gun-salute.

Tika, as the eldest son was traditionally known, was allotted apartments with his two brothers and eight sisters, and they had limited contact with their parents apart from a meal on Sundays. They were educated at the palace’s royal school, where he learned to recite Kipling’s poem If, and started his day either riding or doing drill at 6.30am. Scouting, carpentry, ploughing with bullocks and tinkering with cars as well as academic work followed. The feudal atmosphere was tempered by the headmaster, Jack Meyer, a tough member of MCC. Meyer was pleased when he asked Tika whether, when he was rich, he would buy cars or dig wells, and the boy replied: “Dig wells.”

In 1933 the royal school moved to England, where it became the public school Millfield in Somerset. But although Tika was one of the first seven boys in the school, he soon left to end his English school days at Haileybury before returning to India in 1939. He next went to St Joseph’s Academy at Dehra Dun and started at the Shivaji military school in Poona before becoming the maharaja.

After the princes’ parliamentary defeat, Dhrangadhra abandoned politics for scholarship, concentrating on the history of the Jhala family, a warrior clan whose proudest boast was that eight succeeding generations had died in battle against the Mughals. While declining to send his historical work to academic journals, he set up a small palace press to disseminate his work to friends, and obtained software to re-create tartans worn by Dhrangadhra soldiers in the 1940s.

The Maharaja of Dhrangadhra was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1948, and was the last surviving KCIE. He was president of Rajkumar College in Rajkot; and a life member of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association; of the World Wildlife Fund; the International Phonetic Association; and the Heraldry Society. He was also a member of the Cricket Club of India, the Fencing Association of Great Britain and the Bombay Masonic Lodge.

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo, who has since published a very nice tribute to Meghrajji III on his own blog.

The late Major General Yuri Ivanov

Richard Silverstein, in Eurasia Review, points the finger at Mossad.

The Telegraph is reporting that Maj. Gen. Yuri Ivanov, deputy head of Russian intelligence service known as GRU, died in Syria recently. Speculation is rampant that he was assassinated. He had been staying in the northwestern Syrian resort of Tartous when he disappeared, with his body later hauled in by Turkish fishermen.

Here is some background on Ilanov:

Major-General Yuri Ivanov, 52, was the deputy head of Russia’s foreign military intelligence arm known as GRU which is thought to operate the biggest network of foreign spies out of all of Russia’s clandestine intelligence services.

…Reports have suggested he was on official business and the location where he is reported to have disappeared was only about fifty miles from a strategically vital Russian naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus which is being expanded and upgraded to service and refuel ships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The facility is Russia’s only foothold in the Mediterranean Sea, and Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, is known to be concerned that Moscow will use the upgraded facility as a base for spy ships and electronic espionage directed at the Middle East.

One wonders whether this is another variant of the U.S.S. Liberty episode in which Israel is warning the Russians not to stray too far into Israel’s business and its “sphere of influence.” I have written here about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Syria. Given this, the Mossad cannot have liked one of Russia’s top spies setting up a new base in Syria. Israel undoubtedly feels it has its hands full anticipating attacks by Hezbollah or Syria on its northern front. To add Russian mischief to the mix would be even more dangerous for Israeli interests.

The Guardian further adds that Ivanov was the architect of several spectacular assassinations of Chechen separatist leaders on foreign soil, one in Qatar. It seems perfect justice for Ivanov himself to have died in similar circumstances.

Of course, this is speculation. But given the dearth of facts, it seems credible speculation that awaits further confirmation or repudiation.

This incident recalls a not dissimilar one in 2008, in which a Syrian general and confidant of Pres. Assad was assassinated by a sniper while sunbathing at his southern Syrian coastal villa. In that case too, if I recall correctly, the Syrians originally reported that Gen. Suleiman died in a “swimming accident.” The general was Syria’s main liaison with Hezbollah and responsible for supplying it with sophisticated weaponry, and as such would’ve been a desirable Mossad target.

Furthermore, Israel, if it killed Ilanov, is sending Assad a message that it has penetrated his circle and those of his closest allies. No one is safe.

It’s difficult to see who else might have been responsible, but if Israel really did assassinate a very senior and important official of Russian military intelligence, that was certainly a bold and risky move. The Russians are decidedly not the United States. They believe absolutely in avenging this kind of thing, and the long knives will be out.

Intelligence services typically do not engage in killing one another’s officers for the obvious reason that retaliation is certainly within the capablities of the opposition and intelligence professionals are not eager to affix targets on their own backs.

If Mossad really killed the second-in-command of Russian military intelligence, there has to have been a very very good reason for such a drastic and dangerous step. And if it was Mossad, we can expect to see intelligence service gang war break out openly as a result.

Jim Treacher, at Daily Caller, wrote the admirable headline quoted above.

[Yesterday] afternoon James Jay Lee, a crazy person with a gun, a bomb, and an anti-human manifesto inspired by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, took hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring. He was shot and killed by police. The hostages were freed, unharmed.

WaPo story

James Lee’s manifesto

All this demonstrates that stupidity and bad ideas can have serious, even potentially lethal, consequences.

The Tory Party has promised to allow a repeal vote on the infamous 2004 Hunt Ban.

Bloomberg has read an advance copy of Blair’s memoir.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he deliberately sabotaged the ban on fox hunting his government introduced, calling it “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.”

In his memoir “A Journey,” published by Random House today, Blair said he ensured that the 2004 Hunting Act was “a masterly British compromise” that left enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue “provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed.” He also told Home Office minister Hazel Blears to steer the police away from enforcing the law.

Blair’s 1997 pledge to give Parliament a vote on the subject dogged him throughout his time in office, with lawmakers opposed to hunting repeatedly trying to introduce a ban. Each time, hundreds of thousands of hunt supporters marched through London, and in 2004 some invaded Parliament.

“The passions aroused by the issue were primeval,” Blair, 57, wrote. “If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.”

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who described the law last year as a “farce,” has promised a vote on repeal. Since the act came into force in 2005, only three hunts have been successfully prosecuted, according to the Countryside Alliance, which was formed to oppose the ban. …

Blair said he initially agreed to a ban without properly understanding the issue. Then, during a vacation in Italy, he found himself talking to the mistress of a hunt near Oxford.

“She took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it, and did it with an effect that completely convinced me,” Blair said.

Daniel Greenfield, from across the border in Canada, looks at, and reflects upon, the American mainstream media’s determined self destruction.

Whether it’s Newsweek being sold to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar, or ABC deciding to turn This Week into a BBC program by turning it over to Christiane Amanpour, last week the dying media itself provided us with two examples of why it’s dying.

By choosing radicalism over readers, the media continues narrowing its own readership and viewership, pursuing ideological purity, not only over integrity, but even over its own profits and future viability.

Take ABC’s news division, which has always been notorious for its political radicalism and distaste for the average American viewer.

Whether it was Peter Jennings comparing American voters to “a nation two-year olds” throwing a tantrum for voting in a Republican congress in 1994 (expect this metaphor to make a comeback after these midterm elections) or Ted Koppel turning the names of dead servicemen into an anti-war statement (Koppel was the alternative candidate to take over This Week), this has been the ABC way. But turning over This Week to Christiane Amanpour is part of the growing blend of ABC News and the BBC.

The question though is who is Christiane Amanpour meant to appeal to? To viewers who wanted another foreign talking head snootily reading the news at them, not to them. Who were desperately longing for an ABC News on air personality sympathetic to Islamic terrorists? And why would those people even bother with ABC News, when they already have the BBC.

The problem with the American media is that it doesn’t speak to Americans. That’s why FOX News is successful, and CNN is in the basement. Network news exists underwritten by medication and mutual fund commercials, and even so it’s losing money. ABC News is making severe cutbacks even while cutting Amanpour a 2 million dollar paycheck for a show hardly anyone watches anymore. …

And that is why the media is doomed. By putting politics over profitability, the media left alienated viewers and readers exactly during the critical transition period when it needed them most. And the worse its fortunes grow, the more radical its politics have become.

Ruling out NewsMax as a buyer, while selling Newsweek to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar (still more than it’s worth) will allow it to keep grinding along for a time as a source of lifestyle tips and left wing rants. It is however only a matter of delaying the inevitable. The media cannot survive as a pity project. Not while it is alienating its remaining viewers and readers. And even a government bailout cannot sustain a financially unsustainable industry. And finally there are only so many jobs available at PBS and NPR.

When the left turned magazines, newspapers and TV news into its own bully pulpit, they helped drive away consumers, while locking up those same publications and broadcasts into a liberal ghetto, that was still not liberal enough for them. As print publications increasingly turn their websites into masses of blogs, it becomes hard to tell the difference between Time Magazine, Foreign Policy and the New York Times—and the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. All of them have angry left wing bloggers denouncing Republicans, America and Israel. The difference is that the official media outlets have more prominent names like Joe Klein or Robert Mackey blogging for them.

The Journalist scandal is the tip of the iceberg that shows just how thin the line between the press and the policies that they advocate really is. But that’s not news to anyone. The liberal media is not some right wing talking point, poll after poll shows most of people who read newspapers and watch the news have come to that conclusion on their own. Because while the media elite may sneer at them, the public knows quite well what they stand for. And the more the media goes left, the less the public trusts it. …

The left’s hijacking of American culture has turned institutions into rags and rubble, and it will only get worse. Because the left does not know when to stop. Does not understand that it should stop. That is why left wing revolutions that do succeed, eventually culminate in multiple levels of purges that exterminate many of the original revolutionaries, or send them off to fight and die somewhere else, turning them into convenient martyrs who look good on blood-red T-shirts.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

Peter Robinson listened (which I did not), and found it incoherent, grudging, and disgraceful.

Sample:

Incoherent: The president argued that the war had represented a worthwhile cause, asserting that “We have persevered…because of a belief…that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization.” Moments later, however, the president insisted that the war had instead been mistaken: “We have spent a trillion dollars at war…This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.” The president wants to have it both ways, associating himself with the victory we achieved in Iraq while distancing himself from the costs. As argument, this is incoherent. But of course it isn’t argument. It’s cheap manipulation.

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s Speech 17:57 video

As the fatal election in November inevitably approaches, Rob Long notes that the left is gradually moving past Denial to the second stage.

It’s all part of the Kubler-Ross model, the Five Stages of Grief. Now they’re turning to Stage Two: Anger. Angry at the voters, at Fox News, at Obama himself.

Next up: Bargaining. I’m not sure when that’s going to start — probably a few weeks after Labor Day. But as always, what we’re all waiting for is Stage Four: Depression.

Stage Five is Acceptance, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.