Pakistan, Britain secretly battled for Kohinoor

LONDON—Nearly three decades after India was partitioned and the British Raj crumbled, Pakistan sneakily waged a diplomatic war like no other in the Kohinoor diamond’s blood-soaked 750-year-old history with a populist, finely-pitched request from Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to London controversially asking for the gem’s return.
The demand for the Kohinoor’s restoration — to Pakistan, not India because it was on Pakistani soil that the gem was surrendered — came in a letter from the then Prime Minister Bhutto to his British counterpart, James Callaghan on the even of Pakistan’s independence day ceremonies in August 1976.
Using a high-degree of symbolism and emotional rhetoric, Bhutto wrote to Callaghan to remind Britain of the significance of “our annual Independence Day. This occasion never fails to bring to mind Pakistan’s historic grievances about the disposition of territories and assets to which we were entitled upon the termination of British rule.”
Evoking the “immense sentimental value” of the diamond to Pakistan, Bhutto said “Its return to Pakistan would be a convincing demonstration of the spirit that moved Britain voluntarily to shed its imperial encumbrances and lead the process of decolonisation.”
A consummate diplomat, Bhutto bewailed to Callaghan that “little is left in our land from what was bequeathed to us by the centuries of pre-colonial history” and decried the disappearance of “the unique treasures which are the flesh and blood of Pakistan’s heritage”. He said the diamond’s return to Pakistan “would be symbolic of a new international equity strikingly different from the grasping, usurping temper of a former age,” he said.
But despite all Bhutto’s linguistic artistry and psychological tactics, the British stayed resolute about never returning the 186-carat gem, once the world’s largest diamond, to any of the Asian countries that have historically laid claim to it.
Secret British government papers, regularly declassified under the 30-year rule for public disclosure, detail how officials and politicians in London firmly rebutted Pakistan’s forceful claim to a stone that has literally become a jewel of the British Crown and remains an enduring symbol of the glory of the once-mighty Raj Bahadur. The Kohinoor was set in a crown on being formally presented to Queen Victoria in 1852. Now, it remains in the Tower of London as part of the British crown jewels collection.
Officials at the National Archive, the UK government’s official archive, containing records of 900 years of history with records ranging fromparchment and paper scrolls through to recently created digital files and archived websites, told this news agency on Friday the newly-declassified Kohinoor documents had sparked considerable interest.
In a nod to India, Iran and Afghanistan’s competing claims to the Kohinoor, Britain’s Callaghan bluntly reminded Bhutto “of the various hands through which the stone has passed over the past two centuries”.—Agencies