Court orders idol smuggler Subash Kapoor returned to Germany
The extradition treaty that brought him to India in 2012 is the reason it cannot try him further. Four Chola bronzes remain missing.
Fourteen years after India brought him back from a German prison, the antiquities dealer Subash Chandra Kapoor is being sent to Germany again — and for a reason that turns India's own extradition case against him inside out.
The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court has directed the Union government to take custody of Kapoor from Tiruchi Central Prison and proceed according to law to return him. The treaty that allowed India to bring him here in 2012 is the same instrument that has now limited its ability to keep him.
The rule that sent him back
Kapoor, a US citizen and once a celebrated Manhattan dealer, was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to ten years for the burglary and illegal export of 19 antique idols valued at more than ₹94 crore from the Varadaraja Perumal temple at Suthamalli, in Tamil Nadu's Ariyalur district.
Time already served meant the sentence was complete in 2023. Tamil Nadu wanted to prosecute him in further idol-theft cases, and that is where the machinery stopped. Under the rule of speciality governing his extradition, Germany's consent was required before India could try him on charges other than those he was surrendered for. Germany refused permission in four cases. Requests involving others were never resolved.
The court's reasoning was narrow and hard to argue with: allegations may be extraordinarily serious without that seriousness becoming, by itself, legal authority to imprison somebody.
From a village temple to a museum plinth
What Kapoor was convicted of is easier to grasp through the route an object took than through the charge sheet.
An ancient bronze could leave a village temple, acquire paperwork, cross oceans, develop a provenance and end up under museum lighting thousands of kilometres from the place where somebody once lit a lamp in front of it.
His Art of the Past gallery in Manhattan belonged to a different world from the temples in the Tamil Nadu case files. There he was a respected dealer and donor; museums and collectors bought from him. The business dealt in beauty, history and provenance — and investigators would eventually argue that provenance itself could be manufactured.
Tamil Nadu investigators reconstructed a system: thieves targeting inadequately protected temples, middlemen acquiring idols, exporters allegedly mixing ancient bronzes with newly made objects, and certificates describing consignments as handicrafts.
The notes from the German cell
The strangest episode in the case happened three days after Kapoor was detained in Germany on 30 October 2011, when he managed to send a handwritten instruction to his own gallery.
"Give back four items to Selina (Mohammad), Bronze Dancers, which are in the 4 closets," it said. A second note followed days later: "4 dancers bronze in 4 closets = 2 pairs nataraj and conserts (consorts)."
Investigators believed the instruction referred to four enormously valuable Chola bronzes. Kapoor's aide Aaron Freeman allegedly moved them to the apartment of Kapoor's girlfriend, the art dealer Selina Mohammad, before American investigators raided Art of the Past and associated storage in January 2012.
The four sculptures have not been seen since.
How the case was built
Kapoor's father, Parshotam Ram, ran Kangra Arts and Crafts in New Delhi before the family moved abroad in the 1970s. Kapoor emerged from that family business, founded Nimbus Import and Export, and became a significant figure in the international antiquities trade.
American investigators took an interest in 2007, when a container arriving in New York from India held more than 140 antiquities. Kapoor, who was to receive it, abandoned the shipment after apparently learning he was being watched. When the FBI examined why anyone would walk away from so many valuable objects, the trail led back to him.
A mole was placed inside his office. Conversations were recorded. Emails and photographs accumulated.
Then there was Paramaspry Punusamy, a former partner and Singapore-based collector who had quarrelled with him over five sculptures. After losing a court dispute, she began supplying authorities with information, according to investigators quoted at the time — including a recent photograph that helped identify him before his 2011 journey to Germany.
An international antiquities operation was being closed in by the FBI, Tamil Nadu police, an employee turned approver and an aggrieved former girlfriend: an unusually eclectic set of adversaries.
What the ruling settles, and what it leaves
The court has not acquitted Kapoor of anything, and the unresolved Tamil Nadu cases remain unresolved. What it has decided is that a man who has served his sentence cannot be held while consent that may never come is awaited.
The objects themselves are the part no court has addressed. Four Chola bronzes are missing, the temples they came from are still in Ariyalur district, and the conviction that returned 19 idols to India is also the conviction that is now sending the man who took them back to Germany.
