WI: Bahadur Shah II does not support the sepoys

So, what if Bahadur Shah II, last mughal emperor, had come to the conclusion that pissing off the british would be a bad idea, and instead decides to either ignore or fight against the sepoy mutiny of 1857?
What are the effects on India? With the mughals still nominally in charge, would the BEIC still turn into the Indian Raj, at least in its name?
What happens to Bahadur's children? Can they be legitimised, allowing the mughal dynasty to survive?
 
The puppet Mughal Emperors will continue to exist until independence. Assuming an independence movement still rises, I can't see it support the puppet emperors as it was highly based upon enlightenment values, one of which was republicanism.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
1. The sepoys will probably kill him. He only went along with them out of fear for his own life.
2. The Mughals are done away with anyway by the British as soon as they restore control. The very fact that the rebels tried to restore them to real power would make their continued de jure rule unacceptable.
 
1. The sepoys will probably kill him. He only went along with them out of fear for his own life.

No. He went with them because he felt like he was a puppet of the British, and he didn't like that. But, of course, he didn't really know how to lead a rebellion, what with being a puppet emperor more renowned for his poetry than for ruling.
 
But, of course, he didn't really know how to lead a rebellion,

There were other problems that doomed the rebellion, so even if he was uber competent tactician and a charismatic orator, he'd only delay the inevitable by 3 years at most. Public decrying the mutiny would probably result in an "accident" but he could ignore it publically while secretly trying to save European lives.

For the OP's request, I don't know. His sons are almost certainly spared and he would be able to keep his estates. Also, the Mughals are not even nominal in charge of 75% of the land mass of modern India by this point (since there were plenty of nation states, it's hard to tell what counts as India and what's not, so modern boarders just makes it easier to do an acreage calculation), there were "independent" princely states and company lands outside of de jure Mughal control, so creation of a reduced Raj is plausible.
 
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