On Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the fate of the fabulous Kohinoor diamond is in question after India’s PM Narendra Modi and others have called for the stone to be returned. The call to British officials has fallen on deaf ears
To be fair, India did present the stone to Queen Victoria, and as British heads of state have intimated, possession is nine-tenths of the law. John points out that “the entire British Museum is basically an active crime scene.” If items that were pillaged or taken from colonies were returned, the remaining exhibit would be extremely lackluster – and sparse.
I don’t know what the flap is about. As you can clearly see by the photo inset, Indian people are freely allowed to visit the stone during museum operating hours. If visiting the stone isn’t enough, perhaps an agreement could be struck in which each country might have the stone for half of the year. However, Prime Minister David Cameron may have voiced a reluctance to compromise when he declared, “Hell no, they’re not having that back!”