Reacting to William Dalrymple’s statement that the Kohinoor has many claimants, researcher Anil Dhir has asserted 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 the Jagannath Temple, there is ample documentary proof that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had bequeathed the diamond to the Jagannath temple before his death in 1839.
A letter written by the British Government's political agent from a camp near the Khyber Pass on July 2, 1829, preserved in the National Archives of India at New Delhi, proves this.
Last year, an INTACH team comprising of AB Tripathy, Baikuntha Panigrahi 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.
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 Golden Temple at Amritsar. He had a lifelong yearning to visit Puri, but his impairments restricted him from taking such a long journey. Just ten years later, the British took away the diamond from Ranjit Singh's son, Duleep Singh, in 1849, even though they were fully aware of it being bequeathed to Lord Jagannath at Puri.
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 really fight erupted in 1976 when the 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 Teheran 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.
The Archeological Survey of India made matters murkier by contradicting the Government’s stand by stating in an RTI reply that the diamond was in fact “surrendered†by Duleep Singh to Queen Victoria of England. Jawaharlal Nehru had once said, "Diamonds are for the Emperors and India does not need Emperors."
In October 1997, during Queen Elizabeth’s State visit to India and Pakistan to mark the 50th anniversary of Independence, many Sikhs in India and Britain used the occasion to demand the return of the Kohinoor.
Dhir said 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.
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.
