Sahil Sharma — Baba baroh mandir

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 * How Bali Ram Sharma & his Grandson use temple for there black bussines
of handicrafts *
Temple Name - Baba Baroh Mandir
Bali Ram Sharma and his grandson Sahil Sharma has also build a temple
named by Baba Baroh Mandir in Himachal Pradesh. They Both Used the temple
to hide Handicraft, kangra art, antique, Idols and statues smuggled by
Bali Ram Sharma and his grandson Sahil Sharma and the Temple is also used
by them to keep their black money.
Here is a FIR registered against Bali Ram Sharma Baba Baroh Mandir
Police Station – Mehrauli
Fir Number- 1018 of 2014 under sections 406 of IPC
Relating to cheating and criminal intimidation, wherein as per the
complainant Bali Ram Sharma refuse to return the silver utensils handed
over by the complainant with the intention to cheat the complainant

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 Shail Sharma grandson of Bali Ram Sharma. There is much news about Bali Ram Sharma who is a Murti Chor.
Some of the published news link about Bali Ram Sharma
"The art of stealing"

"At least four antique dealers in Delhi, spread from Jama Masjid to Jor Bagh, provoke the raised eyebrow in antique protection circles along with counterparts in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The adventures of Bali Ram Sharma, who has a plush office-cum-shop in one of Delhi's classy residential areas could well be the plot for a box-office Hindi film. Starting life as a peon at the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India at Delhi, Sharma's aesthetic initiation came with his appointment as an assistant to a senior director with whom he went to most of the treasure houses in the land and overheard his way into the secrets of the antique market. The Kangra Valley, home among others of Moghul miniatures, Sharma is supposed to have devoured in the first stage of his new career."
Source URL
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/theft-of-old-art-works-become-an-established-... />
Now Shail Sharma grandson of Bali Ram Sharma takes over the business and now Shail Sharma handled whole business. Like Kangra art, stachu, Painting, Handi craft, Antique Dealers.

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 The adventures of Bali Ram Sharma, who has a plush office-cum-shop in one of Delhi's classy residential areas could well be the plot for a box-office Hindi film. Starting life as a peon at the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India at Delhi, Sharma's aesthetic initiation came with his appointment as an assistant to a senior director with whom he went to most of the treasure houses in the land and overheard his way into the secrets of the antiques market. The Kangra Valley, home among others of Moghul miniatures, Sharma is supposed to have devoured in the first stage of his new career.
Kidnap Drama: A perceptive revelation of Sharma's fortunes after he left the Archaeological Survey comes from the episode of his kidnapping by a dacoit chief operating around Gwalior. In the early '70s, Sharma was lured to Gwalior with promises of securing a cache of rare antiques.
Shortly after his departure from Delhi, his family received a ransom demand from the dacoit chief who wanted Rs 700, 000 in exchange for Sharma. While his brothers, one of whom still works in the Publications Division of the Archaeological Survey, began arranging the ransom, Sharma's dare-devil wife went down to Gwalior, tracked down the dacoit and duped him on Raksha Bandhan day into adopting her as a sister.
Later she asked her 'raakhee' brother to free Sharma and the proud Chambal Valley Thakur, though it might have broken his heart, found it impossible to desecrate local tradition by breaking his word to his adopted sister. The deal was reported closed with Rs 100, 000 changing hands, the money taken by the dacoit as the share for a partner in the kidnapping.
Recently, Sharma turned the tables on the Delhi Police and the Archaeological Survey when he got the courts to release a large number of sculptures that the police had unearthed at his huge Mehrauli farm in 1975, because the prosecution could not prove that these were over a 100 years old and ought to be classified as antiques.
The Archaeological Survey and the CBI antiques unit are requesting state CIDs to set up antique cells at all district centres but as Bal Kishen Thapar, Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India put it, what is necessary is the policing of the antique dealers and a national drive so that villagers and townsmen feel the need to preserve local sculptures and art objects Thapar pointed out that small-time temple priests at remote centres are stunned by the huge sums of money offered and do not see much wrong in replacing an old, even dilapidated idol with a bright new marble one.
Though the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 makes it compulsory for Indian owners of antiques to register their pieces, nobody is convinced that the dealers have yet brought out all their collection nor are they likely to care too much for the law when they acquire new rarities.
Indian business tycoons have lately come in as big-time collectors, often paying black money to dealers for the unique piece and, according to whispers in the antiques market, at least some of these pillars of the economy buy and sell antiques too.
MINIATURES: PRICELESS HAUL

Sculptures unearthed at Sharma's farm in 1975
The recovery of a large number of rare Moghul miniatures, stolen in 1971 from Dr Dharam Pratap's collection in Varanasi, was largely because of the venerable collector's insistence that the local police had given up chase a bit too early.
The CBI Antiques Unit proved the doctor right when it recovered a large number of the stolen paintings last month following a renewed investigation that commenced in 1977 with the interrogation of Dr Pratap's domestic servants.
According to CBI, some of the servants in the house were put on the job by local criminals who had contacts with dealers in Varanasi, Delhi and Calcutta. The CBI's recoveries were at Varanasi and Delhi but they found nothing with the Calcutta dealer.

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 There were perhaps twenty Western dealers who visited Jaipur in those days—French, Italian, British, and American. They stayed at the Rambagh Palace Hotel, the sprawling former home of Jaipur’s royal family, and they came to rely on a new generation of Indian dealers like Ghiya, who could spare Westerners the risk and the discomfort of venturing out of the major cities on their own. Chief among these new dealers, according to people who knew him, was a man named Baliram Sharma. Based in Delhi, Sharma was arrested on several occasions, but he was never jailed for long. He became so influential, one Indian antique dealer told me, that dealers throughout the country “worked under the blessing of Sharma.”

“Nowadays, somebody farts here in New York and they know about it thirty seconds later” in Rajasthan, one dealer who had bought from Sharma and Ghiya told me. But, in the nineteen-seventies, “no one knew what we were asking for the pieces they sold us.” Sharma and a few others “were supplying all of the Western trade, ” the dealer continued, and Sharma in particular was becoming extraordinarily wealthy. The dealer recalled running into Sharma at the airport in Zurich, and joking, “What are you doing? Visiting your money?” (When I contacted Sharma, who is now retired, he replied, “I think some unfriendly man gave you my name and e-mail address. I was never in the antique business.”)

It was an indication of Ghiya’s ambition that when he entered the business, in the seventies, he did so not with the blessing of Sharma but in direct competition with him. People who knew Ghiya say that although he lacked Sharma’s well-trained eye, he made up for it by amassing a vast inventory. According to the police, he began targeting the same archeologically rich areas as Sharma, and poaching Sharma’s suppliers by paying slightly more than he did.

“He was so ambitious I can’t tell you, ” Jack Franses, a former Sotheby’s employee who met Ghiya in Jaipur in the early eighties, said of him. Ghiya took him to a dusty warehouse filled with antique dhurries (a kind of woven rug) and looked on as he went through them. “I like the way you work, ” Ghiya said admiringly. He said that he could get anything for anyone. “If you want the Taj Mahal, I’ll send it to you, ” he told Franses. “I’ll take it down piece by piece.”

Ghiya cultivated dozens of middlemen throughout India. Part of the durability of Ghiya’s network, authorities say, was that any given link on the chain knew only the links on either side. What connected these discrete links, from the local thief to the London auction house, was photographs. When a statue was stolen from a temple or bought for some small amount from a local farmer, it was brought to a middleman, who photographed it. The photograph would then make its way, often through further intermediaries, to Ghiya. These photographs were sent to prospective buyers abroad, or taken by Ghiya on sales trips to London and New York. “He’d come with a big stack of Polaroids and you’d go through it, ” one Western buyer told me. “There was nothing selective about it. It was a ton of junk with some wonderful stuff mixed in.”

One evening in Jaipur, I met Abhay Singh, who was Ghiya’s driver from 1984 to 2000 and is now a major witness in the government’s case against him. Singh is lanky, with pitted cheeks and a schoolboy part in his hair, and he told me about driving Ghiya into the countryside to rendezvous with middlemen and inspect their wares. Ghiya was extremely cautious, even paranoid, Singh said. Even when he wasn’t engaged in a deal, he kept a close watch on the rearview mirror, fearing that their car was being followed. Having selected the pieces he wanted to buy, Ghiya would instruct the middlemen to pack the purchases in their cars and return with him to Jaipur. On the drive back, “he would carry two flags with him, one red and one green, ” Singh explained. “If there was any danger, he would show the red flag to them, and they would stop and change their route.” In Jaipur, Ghiya stashed the objects at one of his godowns, or buried them at his farm, a secluded stretch of grassland dotted with gold and violet wildflowers, with several low-slung concrete buildings and a swimming pool. Ghiya often dug the holes for the sculptures himself. “He would tell the servants he was planting trees, ” Singh said.

“He was too scared and too suspicious, ” one Jaipur acquaintance told me. “He doesn’t get along with anybody in his life. Not even his wife.” When Ghiya wasn’t travelling, he came home late at night; he invested his money in real estate; he had no hobbies; and everyone I spoke with agreed that his interest in the business was driven simply by the enormous sums of money to be made.

At times, his wariness bordered on superstition. “One day, I was frozen cold in Ghiya’s house in Jaipur, ” Ariane Dandois recalled. “So I said, ‘Come on, Vaman, take your car, you drive me to Delhi. I’m going to sleep in a decent hotel room.’ “ Ghiya was nervous about bandits on the Jaipur-Delhi road, but he agreed to drive her. As the two walked out to the car, a bird appeared and swooped in a peculiar pattern around the house. “This is bad luck, ” Ghiya announced, and said that he could not possibly undertake the journey. Dandois tried to reason with him, but he refused.

Ghiya’s caution deepened after he narrowly avoided smuggling charges, in 1989. Customs officers in Mumbai had discovered twenty-one antique objects during a random check of one of his handicrafts shipments. According to the police, and other antique dealers in Jaipur, when the authorities reëxamined the container they concluded that the incriminating items were replicas, not actual antiques. That may have been true, or it may be that Ghiya had bribed the right official. But it is also possible that someone switched the real antiques for fakes. One common smuggler’s tactic in India is to prepare a copy of a looted antique and present it to the Archaeological Survey; once the survey grants a certificate of “non-antiquity, ” the certificate accompanies the genuine antique out of the country.

At around this time, Baliram Sharma retired and, Shrivastava told me, Ghiya “started building an empire.” But, while most dealers and smugglers of Indian antiques insist on inspecting an object before paying for it, Ghiya stopped travelling to the countryside, making his initial selections by examining photographs. The objects were then routed to godowns in Mathura and Delhi, eliminating the transshipment point in Jaipur. Periodically, Ghiya inspected items before sending them abroad, but he increasingly depended on middlemen and photographs.

“He would never leave the photos around, ” Abhay Singh told me. “The photos would come and he . . . would immediately mail those photographs to his buyers.”

In 1991, the British journalist Peter Watson was covering the art market for London’s Observer when he came into contact with a former Sotheby’s employee named James Hodges. Hodges had worked at the auction house for more than a decade, until 1989. Later, it was discovered that he had removed an ancient bronze helmet and a terra-cotta bowl from the premises. He was charged with theft, forgery, and false accounting, and was facing trial. Hodges told Watson that corruption and crime were pervasive at Sotheby’s. In the course of several years, he had assembled a dossier of papers, filling three suitcases, that he said documented a business environment in which smuggling and tax evasion were routine.

While Hodges was at Sotheby’s, he said, a number of the auction house’s biggest suppliers had prompted him to open fake bank accounts. These accounts operated as slush funds for a handful of dealers who consigned large amounts o[censored]nprovenanced antiquities. One of these dealers was Giacomo Medici, an Italian smuggler whose Geneva warehouse was raided by the authorities in 1997 and was found to contain several thousand archeological works. Medici, it turned out, was a prolific black marketer with extensive contacts in auction houses and museums. His subsequent trial in Italy implicated Marion True, the antiquities curator of the Getty, who is currently on trial in Rome. (Medici was convicted and is appealing the decision; True has pleaded not guilty.) Another beneficiary of the accounts, Hodges told Watson, was “a Mr. Ghiya of Jaipur.”

Hodges explained that Ghiya was “a kind of Indian Medici, ” whose relationship with Sotheby’s was so close that he would stop at Hodges’s house in Shepherds Bush on his way into London from the airport to drop off antiques he had carried on the plane. After establishing contact with the auction house, in the early nineteen-eighties, Ghiya flooded the antiquities department with items. Hodges showed Watson a 1986 department memo that said, “We now have a clear understanding of what should be sent [by Ghiya] and have ruled out the lower end of the market.” Brendan Lynch, one of Sotheby’s Indian-antiquities experts, had met with Ghiya, and the memo proposed that Lynch begin visiting Ghiya in Jaipur twice a year to acquire objects. “Any visit by a Sotheby’s expert will be monitored in India and justification for such a visit should be readily available, ” the memo said. “It is unconvincing to say every expert is there on holiday and even the pretext of ‘writing a book’ is wearing pretty thin!” In another memo, Felicity Nicholson, who was then the director of antiquities at Sotheby’s, professed to find “the shady side of the antiquities market not uncongenial.”

Some of these memos were produced by Hodges’s defense team when his trial commenced at London’s Knightsbridge Crown Court, in November, 1991. Hodges, who was ultimately convicted of theft and false accounting, testified that the fraudulent bank accounts were considered an “extra service” for clients like Ghiya, and that he kept cash from the accounts in a special cupboard in Sotheby’s offices, because “one couldn’t keep on popping down to the bank.” Brendan Lynch, who had become Ghiya’s closest contact at Sotheby’s, fared especially poorly on the stand. When he was asked about his trips to India, he insisted that his purpose was not to acquire objects but merely to conduct “research and . . . valuations.” But the defense produced an expense report from a 1988 trip, in which Lynch had written, under “Purpose of Visit, ” “To obtain property for the June 13 Indian sale.” When Lynch was asked whether he had ever hidden in the closet at Vaman Ghiya’s Jaipur home, he replied that he had not, but he conceded that on one occasion, when the police visited Ghiya, he did hide in the other room.

The trial was followed closely in the British press, but, even after Lynch’s testimony, the auction house did not terminate its relationship with Ghiya. Watson’s book, “Sotheby’s: The Inside Story, ” was published in 1997, and had a more pronounced effect. Brendan Lynch left the company, and Sotheby’s announced that it was closing its London antiquities department. “It has always been Sotheby’s policy to be sensitive to issues of patrimony and heritage, ” a spokesman said at the time. He added that Sotheby’s would continue to auction antiquities, but solely through New York.

When Shrivastava began his investigation, he knew nothing of Watson’s book. In the first phase of Operation Black Hole, he dispatched officers around the country to pose as buyers. “The operation would be successful if I could catch hold of one branch at a time, ” Shrivastava told me. “The actual thief, then the transporter, then the first middleman, then the second, main middleman, then the packer who does the packaging in Delhi, then the exporter, then Ghiya.” As it happened, Ghiya had a tendency to turn on business partners and subordinates, and to terminate relationships on the slightest suspicion. (“He had no friends, ” I was told on more than one occasion in Jaipur.) The caution and distrust that had enabled Vaman Ghiya to remain at large for so long had also produced a considerable number of disgruntled ex-employees. Before long, Shrivastava had located several who were willing to talk.

The testimony of these local thieves and middlemen was compelling, but inadequate as evidence. In some cases, the disappearance of idols had been registered with local police departments, but Shrivastava needed photographs of the pieces in the village temples from which they had been taken. Since the records of the Archaeological Survey and various state archeological authorities are woefully incomplete, Shrivastava began scouring libraries and archives in search of old photographs and archeological records. (Around this time, he also received a copy of Watson’s book.) He sought out Ph.D. dissertations from the nineteen-sixties, many of which contained photographs of sculptures in their original temple settings. He concedes that his work became an obsession. “In my department, people said, ‘You have gone mad! You are the man of archeology and art and culture.’ And I was reading all the time and doing this bloody job, ” he said, chuckling. “This was my favorite hobby.”

Occasionally, Shrivastava’s research produced vivid illustrations of what was lost when a religious relic was smuggled out of India. He stumbled across a series of beautiful Matrika, or mother goddess, statues from outside Tanesar, a village near Udaipur. Originally, there were a dozen of the statues, each about two feet tall, carved from dark-green schist, and dating to the fifth century. They depicted graceful, broad-hipped women, each in a different stage of motherhood: one pregnant, one breast-feeding an infant, one cradling a toddler, one walking a child. An Indian archeological journal had published photographs of the Tanesar Matrikas in 1961. Sometime thereafter they were stolen and smuggled out of the country. In the late nineties, one of the statues appeared in a Sotheby’s catalogue, and in February, 2003, Shrivastava assembled some photographs of the sculptures and travelled to Tanesar.

When the police contingent arrived at the village, a crowd formed. Shrivastava’s men asked whether anyone remembered a series of statues of women that had once stood nearby. “We got hold of a person who was now eighty years old, ” Shrivastava told me. “Long white hair. Old guy.” Shrivastava asked the man if he remembered the Matrikas, and after a moment the man said, “Oh, yes, I recall, seven or eight idols were there of a lady, a lady feeding her child.” Shrivastava took out the pictures of the Matrikas. The old man stared at them for a moment. Then he began to weep.

I asked what had become of the Matrikas, and Shrivastava told me that they had ended up in various museums in England and the United States. Today, one is at the British Museum, one is at the Cleveland Museum, and one is at the Met.

Vaman Ghiya’s interrogation lasted ninety days. Initially, he was forced to share a cell with one of his middlemen, which he considered demeaning. He complained about the uncomfortable quarters and insisted on telephoning his doctor every day to discuss a number of ailments. Shrivastava was eager to carry out the interrogation, but Ghiya would break his silence only to say, “Why don’t you tell me the name of your foreign bank account? I will send the money.”

Shrivastava subjected Ghiya to long nights of questioning that began at 6 p.m. and continued until the morning. He describes his relationship with Ghiya during these sessions as somewhat jocular. “Obviously, he was doing illegal things. But it was art, ” he told me. “It was not a bank robbery, he was not Al Qaeda. He is a good conversationalist. But, at the same time, he’s very hard, very hard.” After several days, Shrivastava tried taunting Ghiya, saying that it was his impression that Baliram Sharma was Ghiya’s superior in the antiquities trade. “He has been arrested by the police several times, ” Ghiya replied. “This is the first time I have.” And when Shrivastava asked why the auction world continued doing business with Ghiya after Watson’s book and the dismissal of Brendan Lynch, Ghiya snapped back that he was indispensable. “They can survive without Brendan Lynch, ” he said. “But not without me.”

Two weeks into the questioning, Ghiya began to open up. His confession, from which Shrivastava read aloud to me, was recorded by hand in Hindi in a series of lined blue notebooks, and describes a staggeringly sophisticated operation. Because of the free-trade zone and lax inspections in Switzerland, Ghiya shipped items through Geneva, where he maintained three shell corporations. These companies would buy and sell the objects among themselves, to launder the provenance, before forwarding them to auction houses and collectors elsewhere. The auction houses could claim to be accepting antiquities not from India but from a Swiss company that had bought them from another Swiss company—even if the companies shared the same business address and the antiques had been on Swiss soil for less than a week.

James Hodges had shown Peter Watson documents with the letterhead of two Swiss companies used by Ghiya, Cape Lion Logging and Megavena. Between 1984 and 1986, these two companies alone had consigned some ninety-three lots to Sotheby’s sales. Sotheby’s often paid his commission through a dummy bank account, Ghiya explained. To get cash back into India, Ghiya used hawala, a paperless money-remittance system that is widely used in India and by diasporic South Asian communities throughout the world, and is virtually untraceable.

After Sotheby’s closed its London antiquities desk, in 1997, it simply shifted the business to New York, Ghiya told the police. A regal Jain Tirthankara that the police say Ghiya’s men stole from Krishna Vilas, an Archaeological Survey-protected site in Rajasthan, turned up as Lot 135 in Sotheby’s September, 2000, catalogue, with an estimated price of twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand dollars. (A Sotheby’s spokeswoman told me that the auction house has “not knowingly sold any items” consigned by Ghiya since 1997, and has “the most rigorous duediligence program in the art market.” She also said that Lot 135 was consigned by a New York dealer who to her knowledge has no connection to Ghiya.) Christie’s also continued to auction material that he stole, Ghiya said. The police had recovered a photograph in Ghiya’s secret cupboard depicting a scuffed sandstone Shiva, crowned with an elaborate headdress, his hips thrust to the right and his four arms radiating around him. It perfectly matched the elegantly lit Shiva that Christie’s auctioned in New York on September 20, 2000—down to the jagged right edge of the panel, where it had been pried from its original location. Ghiya said that he had met with representatives from Christie’s as late as January, 2003. A Christie’s spokeswoman told me that “Christie’s does not comment on the identities of their clients.” She added that the lot in question was consigned not by Ghiya but “by a reputable dealer, ” whose name she would not divulge, and maintained that Christie’s “had no reason to believe that Mr. Ghiya had any connection” to the Shiva.

Ghiya eventually supplied Shrivastava with the names of dozens of his buyers in Britain, Switzerland, and the United States. He had an uncanny memory for the street addresses and collecting preferences of various prominent individuals with whom he had done business, and for the fate of many objects that had passed through his hands. Collectors often suggest that they are the custodians and preservers of antiquities that might otherwise suffer from neglect or mistreatment, but Ghiya described the callous mechanics that are sometimes required to smuggle a statue from one country to another. He recalled a squat stone Vahara—a depiction of Vishnu in his incarnation as a boar—that stood in the village of Attru, in southeast Rajasthan. The boar weighed more than a thousand pounds and its legs and torso were covered in a magnificent phalanx of tiny, intricately carved figurines. Ghiya’s thieves stole the statue in the late nineteen-eighties, lacing a chain through the boar’s open mouth and yanking it from its stone pedestal, shearing off its lower jaw and breaking its legs in the process. The piece was eventually sold to a private collector in Zurich.

Ghiya was charged with “habitually” receiving stolen property and with the illegal possession and export of antiquities. Indian courts operate at a sluggish pace, and the trial, which has been under way for more than a year, is expected to continue for at least another year. Journalists are barred from the courtroom, but Abhay Singh said that during the several days that he testified against his former employer Ghiya was alert and engaged, following every word. Despite his detailed confession, Ghiya pleaded not guilty. Torture and coercive interrogation are such a common feature of the Indian criminal-justice system that confessions given to police officers are not admissible in court. When I asked Shrivastava and another officer who was involved in the interrogations whether Ghiya had been tortured, they both dismissed any suggestion of cruel treatment as the timeworn refrain of criminal defendants everywhere. But Ghiya’s supporters, and others who have followed the case, maintain that it would be more unusual if the police had not physically coerced Ghiya’s confession than if they had.

“What Vaman did was he created a sort of aura, ” a Rajasthan textiles dealer told me. Ghiya awakened Indians to the value of their cultural heritage, the dealer explained, by demonstrating the prices that outsiders were willing to pay for it. “He made the market something fantastic.”

We were drinking milky tea in the cramped back room of a small shop in Jaipur’s old quarter, along with four other men. The men were jumpy. They peered suspiciously at several drivers lounging on their auto-rickshaws under a tree in front of the shop, and asked if I had been followed; they repeatedly insisted that I not use any of their names. Sandipan Sharma, an Indian journalist, had warned me that in the Jaipur art world antique dealing is “like doping in athletics”—everyone dabbles in it, and everyone denies doing so. Sure enough, none of the men would say that they dealt antiques. One told me that his main business was jewelry; another insisted that he was a goldsmith. “After this case, everybody says, ‘I sell only handicrafts, ’ “ one man joked. The others laughed nervously.

The antiquities law has many critics. “The law as it stands doesn’t benefit anybody, ” said the scholar and curator Pratapaditya Pal, who came to the United States in the mid-nineteen-sixties and built several renowned collections, including Norton Simon’s. The law is self-defeating, Pal believes, because it makes no distinction between a masterpiece and any generic antique. The result is a black market that the government lacks the resources to control. Pal prefers the model adopted by Japan, which identifies art works of national significance and keeps them in the country, while allowing everything else to be sold on the open market. The difference between what Walter Benjamin called “cult value” and “exhibition value” makes the issue particularly vexed in India. Indians who are involved in the art world frequently express frustration that their countrymen have little interest in the purely artistic value of religious art. “We may be very advanced in the Internet and outsourcing and all that, ” Pal said. “But I see absolutely no response to antiquities of any kind among any of the people I meet [in India], and I meet only the educated, upper crust.”

It is not clear what will become of the thousands of art works that the police say Ghiya smuggled out of the country between the nineteen-seventies and his capture. A dispute between the Archaeological Survey and the state government in Rajasthan over who would underwrite the cost of returning the art seems to have stalled the prospect of recovery. Even if works are returned, it is not clear where precisely they would go. Pal pointed out that, even after the Indian government spent enormous sums to secure the return of Norton Simon’s bronze Nataraja in the seventies, the sculpture—which is considered one of the masterpieces of Indian art—was neither restored to the temple from which it had been stolen nor displayed in a museum.

The police ultimately unearthed some nine hundred antiques in Ghiya’s various godowns around India, and trucked them back to Jaipur. Today, they inhabit a storage space at Jaipur’s Vidhyadhar Nagar police station. Officials have announced a plan to assemble all the recovered treasures into a permanent exhibit—a sort of Ghiya Collection of South Asian Art—which would be displayed at Hawa Mahal, Jaipur’s beautiful, tapering Palace of Winds, in the heart of the Pink City. I visited Hawa Mahal, the façade of which is a lacy scrim of pink sandstone, perforated with hundreds of tiny windows through which nineteenth-century noblewomen could watch street festivals without being seen. There I met Zafar Ullah Khan, who has been assigned to curate the exhibit. Each sculpture had been photographed before being placed in storage, and, as we flipped through huge stacks of these black-and-white pictures, Khan told me that one day all of the sculptures would be on display. But, for the time being, they must stay in storage. The Palace of Winds needs a burglar alarm and closed-circuit security cameras. They couldn’t possibly display so precious a trove of antiquities in so unguarded a space.

One enduring mystery is why a man of Ghiya’s means has been unable to bribe his way out of prison. Ariane Dandois heard rumors in Jaipur that Ghiya had powerful enemies. “He had become very rich, very arrogant, and had problems with highly important people, ” she said. “You know, it’s a mafia. Clearly, some people wanted him out of the market.”

But the authorities may simply be sending a message. “When Ghiya was put behind bars, there was a lot of terror, ” Shrivastava told me late one night, as we sat on the deserted terrace of a sumptuous palace that had been reinvented as a posh hotel. The walls were hung with fading photographs of early-twentieth-century shooting parties: stern-faced maharajas and visiting British aristocrats standing triumphant over a mountain of slain ducks; a Rolls-Royce with a dead tiger splayed along its running board, and the caption “Silver Shadow and Tiger.”

Ghiya’s operation was the largest antiquities smuggling racket in India’s history to be systematically dismantled and prosecuted, and, depending on the outcome of the trial, Ghiya could spend the rest of his life in jail. Shrivastava said that for three years after Ghiya’s arrest other smugglers left the business and the outflow of antiquities had been stemmed. “But now I have come to know that again they have started, ” he told me. Bats made lazy figure eights in the air around us, splashing off the surface of the swimming pool. On a low rooftop in the distance, hotel employees spread out blankets and prepared to sleep beneath the stars. “This is a very specialized kind of crime. You have to have a lot of taste. You have to read a lot, ” Shrivastava said. “These new guys, they have taken all the lessons from Ghiya. They are taking more precautions.” ♦

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 For those who imagine that smuggling of Indian antiquities and artifacts is entirely the stuff of cloak-and-dagger police raids, daring swoops in the back rooms of smugglers' sweat-shops, and occasional forays among Indian ruins it will come as a surprise to know that the business is far more pervasive. It is often carried out, subtly and precisely, from the discreet elegance o[censored]pper class Indian drawing rooms, where being knowledgeable about antiques is considered a refinement, and doing occasional trade in them only adds to the glamour.

Those who have followed the adventures of Bali Ram Sharma, a New Delhi dealer in antiques, whose farmhouse outside the city was raided recently to yield so-called treasures, may have reason to be cynical.

This wasn't the first time Sharma's dealings were apprehended. Or the first time his farmhouse was raided. Or, indeed, the first time that Sharma embarrassed the Delhi Police by proving that much of the stuff found, among them giant idols, carvings and sculpture was not over a 100 years old, and therefore could not be classified as antiques.

Unsuccessful Efforts: Back in 1975, the Delhi Police went through a similar routine. They recovered a load of antiques from Sharma's farm in Mehrauli only to discover that Sharma could get away scot-free since the antiques could not be proved "genuine".
Nearly all the efforts of the Indian police or for that matter the attempts of the specialised Antiquities Cell of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) set up in 1974 have been stumped similarly. One simple reason is this: Can a police officer be expected to tell the real thing from the fake?

By the time the police has referred the matter to the CBI, and the CBI has called in the expertise of the Archaeological Survey of India, chances are that a hardened antique dealer may have been "laundered". If like Bali Ram Sharma, he started his career as a peon with the Archaeological Survey and was on their staff for years before breaking into business, his past connections may be proved particularly useful.

The haul at Sharma's farm; were the antiques
The cell at CBI, which pathetically comprises of a total of two field men, is technically the central coordinating authority for recording thefts of all antiques in the country. Since its inception in 1974 it has, on an average, registered about 450 cases of major antique thefts each year. These have been referred to the cell from state and Central Police Authorities as well as intelligence departments in the states. Yet, since 1974, its concerted efforts have succeeded in solving no more than 10 cases. "What do you expect us to do?" asks one CBI official, "with two active men manning the whole service."

Tricks: Officers of the CBI and police services admit that the number of antique thefts that are successfully intercepted are "negligible" in comparison to the number of cases that go undetected. Police officials also acknowledge their lack of knowledge or training in detecting "real" antiques among the shiploads of fakes that are legally exported as handicrafts. The law only forbids export of objects over a 100 years old, which it terms "antique".
"Even our own experts get fooled, " he adds, giving examples of recent tricks smugglers have perfected. Among the most widely practiced these days is to buy pages from old manuscripts with fine, hand-painted borders. The calligraphy between the painted margins is erased to be replaced by "new" paintings, so perfectly executed on the ancient parchment, that it is hard to tell the difference.

Yet the CBI prides itself on the few recoveries it has successfully made. Among the more spectacular is the case of the two Amin pillars of the Sunga dynasty worth Rs 40 lakh that were discovered in London nine years after they had been stolen from Kurukshetra. The discovery was made in conjunction with Interpol and Scotland Yard only after an archaeologist discovered that the real pillars had been replaced by fake ones.
The architect of this complex escapade that concerned several forgeries of the pillars was the greatest antique dealer of them all, Manu Narang. Narang is now in the country but the case of the recovered Amin pillars is still winding its way through courtrooms.

Minimal Penalty: Beside the never-ending litigation that limits the CBI's ability to take action firmly, another dissuading factor in rounding up professional smugglers of antiques is the minimal penalty they pay. Stealing art treasures is a bailable offence with a maximum of six months in jail-"the kind of punishment, " says one police official, "that is not hard to risk if you have crores of rupees at stake." Provincial police officials agree that pursuing art thieves is quite low on their list of priorities.

Moral or artistic considerations aside, mass-scale disappearance of Indian art objects also leads to their commercial depreciation in the art markets of the West. "It's a question of availability, " explained a visiting art expert from the famous British auctioning house of Sotheby's recently. "There is simply too much of Indian art available too easily. Indian antiques, barring exceptions, will never fetch the same price as Chinese or even Persian antiquities.

There is almost as large a variety of ancient Indian sculpture to be seen in private American and European collections, for example, as there is in Indian museums. A recent exhibition of stone sculpture from the Gupta period held by the Asia Society in New York bore out the expert's remark: of the three dozen pieces on display, only two had been borrowed from Indian museums. The rest were on show from the biggest names among American collectors - from Rockefeller to Norton Simon.

Registration: Indian art scholars and historians are well aware of this, and tend to speak cynically on the subject. "Of course it hurts to see Indian treasures being collected by some Texan millionaires, " says one, "but one need not be too chauvinistic about it. After all, we cannot maintain properly what we have in our museums.

It was with a view to maintaining a record of antiques and art objects owned privately by Indians that in 1976, the Indian Government issued an amendment to the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972. According to the amendment, all art objects, heirlooms, or treasures over 100 years old had to be registered as antiques with their photographs with the 104 offices of the Archaeological Survey set up all over the country. Despite the laborious bureaucratic procedure involved, the Survey claims that over two lakh objects have so far been registered and that the organisation's branch offices have begun to catalogue them.

The Survey considers its efforts at collecting information fairly successful. Less complimentary are the criticisms levelled against the Survey by private collectors and art scholars, who complain that it is as bureaucratic and muddle-headed as any other department of the Government. Others go as far as to allege that the Survey has done little to disseminate its expertise-a fact that works to the advantage of professional art thieves.

Professional smugglers, who work on a system of large commissions for procuring objects for patrons abroad, may have several deals going at a time, of which only a couple may work. Operating through agents and villagers who scour the countryside for prize pieces, smugglers may only strike a fortune occasionally.
Considerably more difficult to pin down are the amateur collectors of art - the proliferating tribe of diplomats, art scholars and dilettantes who effectively carve up national treasures for private profit or pleasure. Unless this axis is successfully cracked up, antiques will continue to be drained down a bottomless pit.

Sep 13, 2016

Updated by anonsh2 Baba Baroh is a tehsil in Kangra district, India known for a temple made of white marble to Radha Krishan and the Goddess Durga. This temple is famous for the largest amount of white marble used for any temple in Himachal Pradesh. Baba Baroh Mandir located 23 km from Kangra. In Baba Baroh Mandir there is an idol of Goddess Durga made of metal.It was built by Mr.Bali Ram Sharma who is the antique dealer and grandfather of Sahil Sharma.

Starting life of Bali Ram Sharma

The adventures of Bali Ram Sharma, who has a plush office-cum-shop in one of Delhi's classy residential areas could well be the plot for a box-office Hindi film. Starting life as a peon at the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India at Delhi, Sharma's aesthetic initiation came with his appointment as an assistant to a senior director with whom he went to most of the treasure houses in the land and overheard his way into the secrets of the antiques market. The Kangra Valley, home among others of Moghul miniatures, Sharma is supposed to have devoured in the first stage of his new career.

Actually, Bali Ram Sharma built Baba Baroh Mandir just only one purpose. He and his grandson Sahil Sharma Used the temple
to hide Handicraft, kangra art, antique and statues and smuggled in International Market.

It is not the myths. There are many prove and many articles published against Bali Ram Sharma

like
1) The art of stealing - http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/theft-of-old-art-works-become-an-established-... />
2) The Idol Thief - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/07/the-idol-thief

When Bali Ram Sharma is blacklisted then Sahil Sharma Who is the grandson of Bali Ram Sharma assumes control over the business and now Shail Sharma took care of entire business. Like Kangra art, stachu, Painting, Handi craft, Antique Dealers. In any case, Both are a 100% Chor as Grandfather as Grandson.

Baba Baroh Mandir