15 Chandigarh heritage items sold for Rs3.34 crore
Amarjot Kaur
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, October 1
A total of 15 heritage items, mainly Chandigarh’s furniture designed by architects Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, were auctioned for Rs3.34 crore in Paris yesterday. Among these items, a pair of chairs, in solid teak and fabric, dating back to 1960, was sold for Rs78.22 lakh.
Ajay Jagga, a member of the UT Administration’s Heritage Items Protection Cell, said it was “the costliest pair of Chandigarh chairs sold so far.”
Expressing concern and demanding a probe into how the city’s furniture reached the auction house in Paris, Jagga had earlier (on September 28) penned a representation to political and diplomatic channels of India and France. He has again demanded investigation into the matter.
He pointed that the Ministry of Home Affairs had banned the export of UT’s heritage furniture in an order dated February 22, 2011.
Today, in a yet another letter to India’s Minister of Culture G Kishan Reddy and French Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, Jagga wrote: “There is an emergent need to get the matter examined from the law-enforcing agencies of Paris, as to how these items reached Paris. Whether laws of India and France were followed or not. There is a complete ban on the sale/disposal of such items in India as also on export. Whether the seller is in legal/lawful possession.”
The letter has also been sent to the PMO and the HMO along with state ministers Arjun R Meghwal and Meenakshi Lekhi, Jawed Ashraf, Ambassador of India to France, and others.
