NEW YORK, USA, May 7, 2007: Early one morning in June, 2003, two dozen police officers drew their guns and prepared to raid a stately three-story brick-and-concrete home on a corner lot in Everest Colony, a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Indian city of Jaipur. Several khaki-clad officers scaled the imposing stone wall surrounding the house, disarmed a guard, and opened the gate. Under the gaze of a security camera, the rest of the team filed silently onto the property. The raid was the culmination of a yearlong investigation and months of surveillance, during which officers had posed as vagrants and fruit peddlers.
The officers called out, Open the door! They ran upstairs to the master bedroom, where they found the owner, Vaman Narayan Ghiya, standing in his pajamas, hurriedly throwing documents into an improvised fire on the floor. How dare you? Ghiya shouted. How could you enter my house? He cursed at the officers who rushed to restrain him, struggling and shouting, You cannot touch me!
The police led Ghiya away. Then Superintendent Shrivastava and his men searched the house. Behind the wood panelling of Ghiyas private study, the officers discovered a set of secret cupboards, which held hundreds of photographs of ancient Indian sculptures: graceful stone figures of the deities Vishnu, Shiva, and Parvati and Parvatis elephant-headed son, Ganesha; Jain Tirthankaras and Chola bronzes; dancing goddesses with many arms and melon breasts, festooned with delicately rendered ornaments. Many evidently had been roughly pried away from temple walls and were missing limbs or heads.
Vaman Ghiya operated one of the most extensive and sophisticated clandestine antiquities rings in history, and he had grown rich in the past three decades by smuggling thousands of Indian antiques to auction houses and private collectors in the West. The police found no sculptures in Ghiyas home. But, in the days that followed, Shrivastavas men raided half a dozen properties that Ghiya owned around Jaipur, his farm outside the city, and various godowns, or storage facilities, in Mathura and Delhi. They discovered antique paintings, swords and shields, marble panels, stone pillars, three hundred and forty-eight pieces of sculpture, and a dismantled Mogul pavilion the size of a small house.
[To read more of this interesting article, that alerts to the reality of sacred items stolen from temples, click on the link above.]