When the dancing Shiva finally came back to Chennai on Thursday — after a world 'tour' that covered Hong Kong, London, New York and Canberra — a group of policemen was there to receive it. The policemen belonging to the idol wing of the Tamil Nadu police's CB-CID were delighted to see the idol come back, only the third Nataraja to be returned so far to India.
Till recently, the icon was sitting at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. It had been sold to the gallery by the international antique smuggler Subhash Kapoor for $5.1 million seven years ago. It took some really painstaking work by the idol wing to convince the gallery that the icon, was pilfered by Kapoor and needed to be sent home.
Officers of the wing see the return of the Nataraja as a big victory. "Its early return by Australia will permit us to speed up the trial of Kapoor, which will act as a deterrent to global traffickers like him," says Prateep V Philip, head of the idol wing.
The specialized wing, the only one of its kind in the country, is a team of some 20 police officers exclusively dedicated to cases of idol theft — a common enough occurrence in a state that boasts of over 1 lakh bronze idols and thousands of stone statues in temples.
It pursues international thieves like Kapoor who move around in a charmed circle of art collectors in high society.
According to the latest figures, the wing's sleuths have arrested more than 55 idol smugglers and seized more than 25 icons worth Rs 100 crore. Tamil Nadu's historic temples, many over a thousand years old, are scattered around the state. Some are in obscure hamlets which were important locations of the Chola empire. Many of these temples are unguarded, some are in ruins and therefore, easy prey for thieves.
After several thefts, it became obvious that Tamil Nadu needed an idol wing in its police department. Its best known case is the one against Kapoor, who is being tried in Chennai currently.
It revolves around the smuggling of icons out of two Chola-era temples in Ariyalur. The smuggler took them to his New York gallery more than six years ago. From Art of the Past, the gallery, Kapoor managed to sell these statues, including the Nataraja at NGA.
The idol wing works thus: thefts are first registered in local police stations and then turned over to the wing. The special department then consults historians, scholars and archaeologists to identify the object, estimate its value and crack the case. It's a skill they learn on the job. Luck too has played an important role sometimes. Cops stumbled on the Kapoor case when some small time crooks were caught on suspicion by Kerala police and they, in turn, led them to their counterparts here. Investigations led them to bigger fish such as Sanjeevi Asokan, Kapoor's agent in Chennai, and eventually Kapoor himself.
Idol wing officers say that in 2006, Asokan and Kapoor recruited thieves to steal idols from temples in Suthamalli and Sripuranthan in Ariyalur district. Two years later, the police nabbed two of them when they came to Ashokan's Chennai office to sell him an Amman idol.
The gang confessed but Asokan maintained that the idols were exported to Hong Kong. But the police traced the trail to Kapoor based on a Rs 1-crore payment he made to Asokan. Kapoor was visiting Germany when Interpol arrested him in 2011. He was extradited to India in July, 2012.
The idol wing was set up in 1983 and given the high-profile nature of the thefts the department solved in its early years -the Pattur Shiva idol theft for example -it acquired a prominent profile. For a decade starting 1991 when it had no big cases on its hands, the wing lost some of its shine and became a 'punishment posting.' Now that the wing has netted Kapoor and worked to bring the Nataraja back, it has regained some of its glory.
The cases the wing deals with are complex and need painstaking detective work. Among the more well-known police officers to have headed the wing is G Thilagavathi. During his tenure, the police were able to retrieve an emerald lingam idol stolen from a temple in Tiruvarur district worth Rs 50 crore.
The state police are also seriously pursuing the case of eight Kapoor idols. One of these is a Ganesha currently with the Toledo Museum of Art in the US. Philip says his team is corresponding with them through the Union ministry of home affairs, CBI, and Interpol.
Noted archaeologist S Nagaswamy commends the idol wing's effort in the Nataraja case but adds that the state should soon start the work of documenting and identifying its idols. This would help it seek the return of pilfered icons from across the world.
The Kapoor loot is sourced from not just Tamil Nadu but also Bihar, Bengal, Goa, Karnataka and Gujarat, say experts. The investigation into the theft of idols and their retrieval often requires collaboration with international agencies and governments and this requires Central Government intervention. Setting up a Central idol wing would perhaps be a good idea, suggests an expert.
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