Bhubaneswar: Contrary to William Darlymple’s statement that the Kohinoor has many claimants, Anil Dhir has said that the legitimate and final claim of the diamond is that of the Jagannath Temple at Puri.
According to Dhir, who has researched the Sikh connection with Jagannath Temple, there is ample documentary proof that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had bequeathed the diamond to the Jagannath Temple before his death in 1839.
Dhir said that the Government of Odisha and the Temple Board should put up a claim. Last year, he had met many MLAs and asked them to pass a resolution in the State Assembly for claiming the diamond back but this did not happen.
According to Dhir, it is an established fact that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had donated more gold and silver to the Jagannath Temple in Puri than even to the Golden Temple at Amritsar. He had a lifelong yearning to visit Puri but his impairment restricted him from taking such a long journey.
Last year, an INTACH team comprising A.B.Tripathy and Dhir had met the Director of the National Archives of India with a request that the original letter mentioning Ranjit Singh’s wishes should be displayed at the Bhubaneswar Centre of the Archives.
The claim for the return of the Kohinoor was first made soon after Independence in 1947 by the Government of India. Another request followed in 1953, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. But the real controversy erupted in 1976 when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in a letter to the British Prime Minister, James Callaghan, submitted a formal request for the return of the diamond to Pakistan. Pakistan’s claim was refused, but Callaghan gave a written assurance to Bhutto that there was no question that Britain would have handed it over to any other country.
Shortly after, a major newspaper in Tehran stated that the gem ought to be returned to Iran. In November 2000, the Taliban regime demanded the return of the diamond to Afghanistan.
In April 2016, the Government of India had told the Supreme Court that the Kohinoor diamond was neither “forcibly taken nor stolen” by the British, but had instead been gifted to the East India Company by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
Fact file
A letter written by the British government’s political agent from a camp near the Khyber Pass on July 2, 1829 is preserved in the National Archives of India at New Delhi. The letter, addressed to T.A. Maddock, the officiating secretary to the Government of India says: “Although the right Hon’ble Governor General of India will have received the melancholy intelligence of the demise of Maharaja Ranjit Singh before my report on that event can arrive, I deem it my duty to announce that His Highness expired at Lahore on the 27th ultimo. During the last days of his illness, His Highness declared to have bestowed in charity, money, jewels and other property to the supposed value of 50 lakh of rupees. Among the jewels, he directed the well-known Coh-I-Nur (Kohinoor) diamond to be sent to the temple of Jagannath at Puri.”
Just ten years later in 1849, the British took away the diamond from Ranjit Singh’s son, Duleep Singh even though they were aware of it being bequeathed to Lord Jagannath at Puri.
For the record, the Kohinoor had been in the possession of Mughal rulers in Delhi for 213 years, with rulers in Kandahar and Kabul for 66 years and with the British for nearly 172 years.
