  The departure of all measured pulsar braking indexes from the "canonical"
dipole value 3 has been attributed to several causes in the past. Careful
monitoring of the Crab pulsar has revealed permanent changes in the spin-down
rate which are most likely the accumulation of small jumps in the angle
$\alpha$ between the magnetic and spin axis. Recently, a large permanent change
in the braking index of the in the "Crab twin" pulsar B0540-69 has been
reported, and an analogous phenomenon seen in the high-field pulsar PSR
1846-0258 has been seen following a glitch, while another similar event (in PSR
J119-6127) needs to be confirmed. We argue in this work that a common physical
origin of all these observations can be attributed to the counter-alignment of
the axis without serious violations of the observed features and with very
modest inferred values of the hypothesized jump in the $\alpha$ angle. In
addition, detected increases of the X-ray luminosities after the events are an
additional ingredient for this interpretation. We argue that a component of a
time-dependent torque has been identified, being an important ingredient
towards a full solution of observed pulsar timing behavior which is in search
of a consistent modeling.
