Mayor Mamdani calls for return of crown jewel to India

Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not welcome King Charles to New York City with a warm embrace, avoiding any mention of the king even when asked Wednesday morning to preview their afternoon encounter at the World Trade Center.

“The focus of that wreath-laying is to honor the more than 3,000 New Yorkers who were killed in the horrific terror attacks of Sept. 11,” Mamdani told reporters. “And that's what I'm really looking to do at that event.”

Pressed on what he might say to the king, he said: “If I was to speak to the King separately from that, I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.”

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is a 106-carat crown jewel that sits at the front of the crown once worn by Queen Elizabeth and others before her. It was claimed by the British in 1849 after winning the Second Anglo-Sikh War and has long been viewed by India as a symbol of colonial conquest.

“He did actually handle it very skillfully,” said Richard Aldous, a history professor at Bard College, noting that Mamdani managed to make a political statement indirectly.

“By getting it into the public domain, but not making it any kind of embarrassment for the actual visit and keeping the focus on 9/11, that does show a kind of a certain political skill,” Aldous said.

“The stone has been out there for centuries, and has been routinely grabbed by whoever conquered that part of the world at a given point in time,” said Owen Pell, the president of the the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.

Pell noted that other nations — including Pakistan, Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have also laid claim to the diamond, which he said is unlike many stolen artifacts.

“This is different. This was known at the time to be something that was given over as part of a peace process that ended a war,” Pell said. "Now, you may not like the war, you may not like the reason it was fought, you may not like the history around who won and who lost. But this is different from a looted cultural antiquity.”

Buckingham Palace declined to comment on Mamdani’s remarks.

Aldous said the mayor’s ethnic background and his father’s academic expertise in colonialism likely played a role.

“Perhaps, it’s no surprise that a mayor whose ancestry is Indian would have a complicated relationship with Britain and with the British royal family,” Aldous said, “and would want to make sure that these issues didn’t get forgotten amidst all of the what we might describe as the usual flummery of a state visit.”