The United States has returned 657 antiquities with a total value exceeding US$14 million to India, according to a press release issued by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office on 28 April 2026. Many of the items are alleged to have been smuggled into the US by a trafficking ring led by Subhash Kapoor, an art dealer who formerly ran a gallery in Manhattan, as well as an import/export business specialising in antiquities from India and Southeast Asia. Kapoor is currently serving a seven year prison sentence in India for crimes relating to theft and smuggling. The artefacts were returned to Indian Consul to New York, Rajlakshmi Kadam, in a ceremony in Manhattan.
The returned items include a bronze figure of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, seated on an inscribed double-lotus base over a lion-flanked throne, with an inscription identifying it has having been made by the master craftsman Dronaditya of Sipur. This was part of a collection of bronze statues unearthed near the Lakshamana Temple in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, in 1939, and placed in the collection of the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur. The statue was stolen and smuggled to the US some time before 1982, entering a private collection in New York before 2014, from where it was seized by the US authorities in 2025. The statue has an estimated value of about US$2 million.
Another item returned was a red sandstone figure of a Buddha standing with his right hand raised in an abhaya-mudra gesture, signifying protection. This item is believed to have been looted somewhere in northern India, and to have been damaged in the process; the statue's feet are broken off, as is most of a halo which would once have sat behind the Buddha's head. It was recovered from a storage unit in New York belonging to Subhash Kapoor by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, and is believed to have been smuggled into the US by him. The statue has been valued at about US$7.5 million.
Another notable item returned is a sandstone statue of the Hindu God Ganesha in a dancing pose. This statue is alleged to have been stolen from a temple in Madhya Pradesh, India in 2000, by Ranjeet 'Shantoo' Kanwar, a convicted trafficker and co-conspirator of Subhash Kapoor, and smuggled into the US by Vaman Ghiya, another notorious trafficker from Jaipur in Rajasthan, where it was sold to the New York art dealer Doris Wiener. When Wiener died in 2012, the item passed to her daughter, Nancy Wiener, who has admitted to knowingly falsifying provenance records for looted items, and sold at Christie's Auction House in New York to a private collector, who surrendered it to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office earlier this year.
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