If these were independent states on par with India or Pakistan then who are Pakistan or India to decide their integrity or declare them artificial when they are themselves constructs formed by the conquests and working of the British.
These were independent states, on the face of it; that wholly ignores the inconvenient fact that this independence did not come about in a vacuum. The princes had been involved in discussions on the devolution of power, and had voluntarily come together under the leadership of the Aga Khan, that famous prince without a state, and had already agreed to merge with the Dominion of India.
If you look up the proceedings of the Round Table Conferences, you will discover that even the much bandied about Instrument of Accession was a summary sheet of paper that was taken for granted, because at the date of the discussions, it was well understood that ALL the states would merge with the Dominion of India; there was then, in the 30s of that century, no thought of the possibility of another Dominion.
In the event, in 1947, because of Mountbatten's tearing hurry to wrap up proceedings and get back to climbing back to his father's job as First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, various shortcuts were taken. The princes were individually counselled by Mountbatten, following the advice of his sambandhi, George VI, that no independence would be countenanced by any of the supposedly independent states, that Great Britain would neither recognise any further, third Dominion, nor encourage the rest of the world to give such an entity sustenance. Furthermore, it was neither India nor Pakistan that decided their integrity, but the British; first, in terms of the India Independence Act, second, in terms of the clear guidance given by Mountbatten over and above the provisions of the Act.
Thirdly, the Crown Colony of India, that was formed into the Dominion of India, was by no means a construct of the British. This is a very common Pakistanophile misunderstanding, sometimes a forced and somewhat disingenuous misunderstanding.
Let me explain.
"Following the 1857 Rebellion, the East India Company's rule in India came to an end.
Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1 November
1858 declared that thereafter India would be governed by and in the name of the British Monarch through a Secretary of State." The British superseded the East India Company. What was the locus standi of that commercial entity, a joint-stock company that was not comprehensible in the legal framework of the Mughal Empire? Simply that of an agent of the Mughal Emperor.
Simultaneously, the Mughal Emperor was deposed.
Both the supersession of the agent and the dethronement of the principal are not new creations by any means; they are merely an annexation of the positions that already existed.
On the contrary, it was the Dominion of Pakistan that was an artificial construct. Do, please, go through the very clear language of the India Independence Act. It gives Dominion status of India, being the former British Crown Colony,
less those portions to be separated and known as Pakistan.
So the constitutional successor of the forcible successor to the Mughals was by no stretch an artificial construct, it was an extension of what had prevailed from the 10th century onwards. The Indian states themselves, incidentally, were specifically artificial constructs, being constitutionally and judicially extensions of the East India Company through a series of treaties that formed the Subsidiary Alliances; every single one of the 536 principalities that co-existed with British India, the Crown Colony, fell into this category,
except for the Khanate of Kalat.
While a goldfish-bowl view of the situation may seem to Pakistani eyes to be a case of two artificial constructs of the British seeking to determine the status of other artificial constructs, as you have proposed, I hope I have been able to explain that the matter was far more advantageous to India than is commonly understood, or if understood, acknowledged in public.
