When Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned from his foreign travels on Friday, in his luggage was a consignment of 200 antiquities, including a beautiful 1,000-year-old Ganesha bronze, that the US government handed over to him. What few know that is behind the goodwill gestures and photo-ops highlighting cultural cooperation is a group of very committed idol chasers who helped investigative agencies in the US crack the cases of stolen antiquities.

In March, when special agents in the US seized two stolen Indian artefacts -a sandstone stele of Rishabhanata and a panel with Revanta and his entourage -from an auction in New York as part of the ongoing decade-long Operation Hidden Idol, among the first to identify the 10th century Rishabhanata was Vijay Kumar, an accountant working for a shipping company in Singapore............Read more

Source: The Economic Times