Question

hiw to bring Kohinoor diamd again to india??

Answer 1

hello mate

The ‘Koh-i-noor’ or the mountain of light has a complex history with different owners spanning from Raja of Malwa to Allaudin Khilji to Babur to Nadir to Maharaja Ranjit Singh and finally Queen Victoria. The Treaty of Lahore - a one line treaty was signed after the Anglo-Sikh war of 1850 and the Kohinoor was transferred to treasury of British East India company and was finally handed over to British Queen.

British never considered it to be Indian possession and as former British PM puts it that Kohinoor diamond in royal crown is ours and there is no point in ‘returnism’. So its a moot point that British is going to return it voluntarily and also the claimants for the diamond are many- India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

Not only this, even the government of India is not very willing to bring back the diamond. In an answer to PIL filed in Supreme Court, the government cited a 43 year old law Antiquities and Art Treasure Act, 1972 that does not allow government to bring back antiques taken legally from India before independence. If our own country is not really enthusiastic about bringing it back then expecting British to take the high road is a distant dream.

Also, it has been debated that it is better to keep the diamond in Britain itself as its return to Asia can open a pandora’s box for the relationship between India-Pakistan and Bangladesh. The relations are already not very friendly and adding one more contention is not quite wise.



The problem is that our national perception of today doesn't necessarily conform with the 'ownership' of an historic relic.

There isn't an iota of doubt that the diamond was taken away from the sub continent. But if it were to be returned, whom will you return it to?

It was 'gifted' (according to most accounts, coerced) to the Queen empress by the maharaja of Punjab.

Would you return it to the Indian state of Punjab or the Pakistani state of Punjab?

Maharaja Ranjit Singh got it from an Afghani, Shah Shuja Durrani. So should it be returned to Afghanistan of today?

Now, Nader Shah looted it from the Mughals. But Mughals didn't control whole of present day India.

If you trace back, it was mined out of Golconda, Telengana. But at that time, we didn't really have the idea of Indian republic as we have today.

Put simply, British didn't steal it from the republic of India. So how can it claim that the diamond belongs to it?

Certainly, republic of India won't pay back the national debts of Mughal empire or Vijayanagara empire. If we can't or rather we won't pay the debts, we can't claim the assets of political entities of the past as well.

In 1700, India accounted for around 23% of world GDP. This was almost equal to the combined GDP of whole of Europe!

When the British left in 1947, we contributed 2.5% world GDP!

They had plundered enough, but arguing to bring back Kohinoor is just a tokenism that can never compensate for the losses.

To be fair, we can't get away with blaming the British. They were just doing something that empires across history were doing for a long long time - exploiting the weak.

Our weakness laid in a splitted society that could be readily exploited. Despite the huge rhetoric around 'Indian values', our rulers of the time never hesitated to flout all the morals and get into unholy alliances with the British (and other colonial powers), just to see their rivals defeated.

Nation building is a tough task. Mere tokenism won't do. We need to go about solving problems like polarization, weak economy etc rather than crying about our weaknesses in the past that led to the flow of wealth out of the country.



the only way to bring kohinoor back to India is to collect all superpower countries with us and gain victory on kohinoor