A look at Kohinoor's Kashmir connection

This week, the Solicitor General told a Supreme Court Bench hearing a petition pleading for the Kohinoor's return to India that was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken away" but "handed over" to the East India Company by the last Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh. The inevitable conclusion was that India would not echo Congress MP Shashi Tharoor's recent eloquent demand for its return .

Then the government backtracked, saying it would try to get the diamond back "amicably". This flip-flop is curious, not the least because the "All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front" has moved the petition, not Dr Tharoor. And advocating a diamond's the human rights sounds as believable as 7-year-old Duleep Singh handing over the Kohinoor on his own rather than acceding to the domineering grownups around him.

Those adults included officials of the East India Company-victor of the First Anglo-Sikh War-and a regency council stacked with machinating Sikh nobles. And on their agenda was war indemnities imposed on the Sikh Empire and its ruler, via the 1846 Treaty of Lahore. A subsequent Treaty of Amritsar was also signed to ensure the vanquished paid up and the Kohinoor, sent to Queen Victoria in 1850, was just part of the package.

Among other items of the Sikh state on the block was "all the mountainous country with its dependencies situated to the eastward of the River Indus and the westward of the River Ravi including Chamba and excluding Lahul, being part of the territories ceded to the British government by the Lahore State according to the provisions of Article IV of the Treaty of Lahore, dated 9th March, 1846." That included Kashmir.

Serendipitously, the Dogra ruler of Jammu, Gulab Singh was only too willing to buy it. Once he paid 75 lakh Nanakshahi rupees to the British, he officially became the Maharaja of J&K. Ergo, the same treaties that saw the Kohinoor pass into Company hands and thence the British crown, also saw a Dogra become ruler of Kashmir. The "human rights" and "social justice" implications suddenly become clearer. If India ever challenges the British right to one coveted K-word, India's own right to the other coveted K-word-gained by the Instrument of Accession signed in 1947 by Gulab Singh's descendant-could also become shaky indeed. No wonder PM Jawaharlal Nehru warned way back in 1956 that trying to reclaim the Kohinoor "would lead to difficulties". Hopefully the government won't fumble on this fact too.