When Pakistan’s Bhutto pressed Britain to give it the Kohinoor

“The Kohinoor is a part of our Muslim heritage which rightly belongs to the people of Pakistan.”

With those words, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pressed Britain in the mid-1970s to hand back the diamond originally mined from the Kollur mine near Golconda in Telengana, before travelling from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s treasury to the British Crown Jewels collection in London.

For Bhutto, still consolidating his authority after the trauma of Bangladesh’s secession in 1971, the claim was about more than a jewel. It was about prestige, identity and legitimacy.

That intervention — recorded in Cabinet papers rediscovered at the UK National Archives — sheds light on how the Kohinoor became a contested prize not only between India and Britain, but also between India and Pakistan.

The Bhutto letters to the British Prime Minister have lain long forgotten in the British archives and were released about 10 years ago. They are currently located in Kew, in south London, and speak about another moment in South Asian history when Pakistan tried to inveigle herself into British affections — something it is trying to do once again, this time with Donald Trump’s America.

The Bhutto file, reference PREM 16/1037, contains 32 pages of correspondence between Downing Street, the Foreign Office and Pakistan. It shows Bhutto lobbying successive British prime ministers, beginning with Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and extending into Jim Callaghan’s premiership. Far from being brushed aside once, the claim lingered across three governments, requiring repeated rebuttals.

In one letter to British Prime Minister James Callaghan, Bhutto says the Kohinoor was taken from Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital, in 1849.

In another, he stresses how the diamond’s display in London is “a reminder of the humiliation of the subcontinent’s Muslim rulers at the hands of imperial power”. In another, he tells his British counterparts that returning the stone would be “an act of goodwill befitting the close ties between Britain and Pakistan”.

He positioned Pakistan — not India — as the true heir to the gem that had once adorned the Mughal Peacock Throne. By linking the claim to Muslim lineage and imperial humiliation, Bhutto sought to bypass India’s case as successor to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, from whom the British annexed the diamond after Punjab’s defeat in 1849.

Whitehall’s private reaction was unvarnished. One ministerial brief warned that engaging substantively would “open a Pandora’s box of claims for the return of treasures acquired in the days of empire”. Another noted the “considerable embarrassment” that would follow if the government conceded any ground. Officials advised Wilson, Heath and Callaghan to acknowledge Pakistan’s words politely, then move swiftly on.

The contrast is telling: Bhutto’s rhetoric of heritage and humiliation on one side; Britain’s fear of precedent on the other. Publicly, ministers talked up Commonwealth friendship. Privately, they were terrified of unleashing a torrent of restitution demands — not just from Pakistan and India, but from Iran, Afghanistan and beyond.

The file contains an intriguing aside. Margaret Thatcher, then still Leader of the Opposition, had visited Pakistan and been taken to view one of its great dams — a prestige project symbolising modernisation and sovereignty.

The symbolism fits. Bhutto’s Pakistan sought to impress Britain on two fronts: monumental infrastructure that embodied nation-building, and heritage claims that asserted cultural legitimacy. Concrete and steel at Tarbela or Mangla, cut and polished carbon in the Kohinoor. Both were meant to project Pakistan’s stature in London’s eyes.

When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Bhutto was gone, executed by General Zia-ul-Haq. The Cold War had recast priorities. Thatcher’s dealings with Pakistan focused on intelligence and military cooperation after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Kohinoor slipped off the agenda, underscoring how tightly the claim had been bound to Bhutto’s own political moment.

Today, the Kohinoor, weighing 105 carats, and mounted in one of the crowns of the British monarch, is displayed in the Tower of London. It is remembered as a quarrel between India and Britain. India has repeatedly demanded its return, invoking Maharaja Ranjit Singh, from whom the stone was annexed in 1849.

Campaigners call it stolen property, a symbol of imperial loot. Britain continues to insist it was “legally acquired” under the Treaty of Lahore.

Now the Bhutto papers add a forgotten layer. It turns out that Pakistan too pursued the stone at the highest level, with the Pakistani prime minister himself asserting its place in the Muslim heritage of the subcontinent. As Bhutto reminded his British counterparts, the Kohinoor was “not simply a jewel but a symbol of our history, our sovereignty and our people’s inheritance.”

For Bhutto, the Kohinoor was not a marginal matter. It was a symbolic weapon, part of his broader attempt to project Pakistan’s prestige abroad and shore up legitimacy at home. By advancing a “Muslim inheritance” claim, he was not only appealing to Britain but also deliberately contesting India’s historic narrative — a rivalry that Indians will immediately recognise.

This rediscovered file matters because restitution is no longer an academic debate. Britain has returned looted Asante gold to Ghana. Germany and Britain have sent Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria. Museums such as the V&A have arranged long-term loans of contested treasures. MPs continue to press for a systematic approach to colonial loot, even as official policy remains hesitant.

Half a century ago, Whitehall officials feared a Pandora’s box. Today, that box is already being prised open.

The file’s closing pages acknowledge what Bhutto understood: the Kohinoor was “a matter not just of possession, but of prestige”. Nearly 50 years later, locked in the Tower of London, the stone still exerts that power.

It is a jewel that binds together the legacies of empire, the rivalries of India and Pakistan, and Britain’s continuing struggle to reckon with its colonial inheritance.

And it remains central to Indian debates. After Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022 and King Charles III’s coronation in 2023, the Kohinoor again dominated headlines in Delhi, sparking parliamentary questions and petitions to the Supreme Court. India insists the diamond is its rightful heirloom. The rediscovered Bhutto files show that Pakistan once pressed just as hard, along with words Britain found embarrassing enough to bury in confidential papers.

As debates rage in parliaments and museums about restitution, the Bhutto files remind us of an enduring truth: the Kohinoor is not just a diamond.

It is a mirror reflecting the unresolved politics of empire, nationhood and identity across South Asia and Britain alike.