In a significant step towards protecting Chandigarh’s modernist heritage, India has formally begun the process of bringing back two Pierre Jeanneret-designed chairs — stolen from Panjab University and PGIMER — after the Ministry of External Affairs and the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO jointly stalled their Paris auction on Wednesday. Additionally, deliberations have been initiated with the French Government seeking physical custody of both pieces.Sources in the MEA told The Tribune that all efforts were being made to secure the return of the two chairs to India and hand them back to Chandigarh, where they rightfully belonged. “We have achieved the first breakthrough in stalling the auction, which was itself a historic first. Now we are hopeful of winning our second battle — the repatriation of our stolen heritage furniture back to India,” a senior MEA official said, adding that certain processes and procedures for such diplomatic action had already been formally initiated with France and that the chairs were expected to be back “shortly”.“It was after Chandigarh Administration’s urgent communication that the MEA and UNESCO’s Permanent Delegation of India acted swiftly to stall the auction. The letter made the legal and cultural case in a manner that gave us the grounds to move fast,” the source said.Punjab Governor and Chandigarh Administrator Gulab Chand Kataria, who had taken suo motu cognisance of a series of The Tribune reports on the Paris auction and earlier sales in Brussels and Chicago before directing Chief Secretary H Rajesh Prasad to act on a war footing, welcomed the MEA and PDI’s action.“Chandigarh’s heritage furniture is not merely government property, it is the soul of this city, an inseparable part of India’s cultural identity and a legacy that belongs to every resident of Chandigarh, to every Indian who takes pride in what this city represents,” Kataria said.“What we have demonstrated this week is that when the Administration, the Centre, the MEA and our diplomatic missions act in concert and act fast, we can stop this. The question now is how we build this into a permanent, systematic response — not just for the two chairs in Paris but for every piece of Chandigarh’s heritage that has left this country over the past two decades,” he said.Hailing the development, heritage activist and advocate Ajay Jagga said the stalling of the Paris auction and the repatriation process now underway represented “a watershed moment” in Chandigarh’s heritage conservation movement. “The challenge now is to ensure this becomes the template, not the exception,” he said.How the intervention unfoldedThe chain of events that led to Wednesday’s auction being halted began with a representation sent on June 22 by heritage activist and advocate Ajay Jagga — member of the UT Heritage Items Protection Cell — to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and Indian Ambassador to France Sanjeev Singla, alerting them to the imminent Paris sale. The two chairs listed by Parisian auctioneer François Epin carried inventory codes that made their government provenance unmistakable: PU/Chem/55 for a chair from Panjab University’s Chemistry Department and PGI/W/CH-0202 for a chair from PGIMER.Acting on the matter after it was brought to his notice through The Tribune’s reports, Governor Kataria directed the Chief Secretary to respond immediately. On June 23, the Administration’s Secretary, Culture, addressed a strongly-worded communication to the Joint Secretary (UNES), Ministry of External Affairs, exclusively accessed by The Tribune, describing the proposed sale as a matter of “national and international cultural importance” and urging the MEA to engage the Indian Embassy in France and French authorities to halt the auction at once.The letter argued that the sale would be “prima facie illegal” under Indian law and “explicitly in contradiction of UNESCO’s framework for transboundary heritage regarding illegal export and trade of art and antiquities,” as well as the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects — to which France is itself a signatory, a legal detail that significantly strengthened India’s hand in pressing its case with Paris. The Administration sought immediate suspension of the auction, preservation of the furniture pending investigation, ownership verification, repatriation assistance and identification of any other Chandigarh heritage pieces circulating through international markets.On the same day, Chandigarh Police registered two FIRs — No. 0080 and No. 0081, both dated June 23, 2026 — under Sections 305(e) and 61(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, initiating criminal investigations into the suspected theft, illegal removal, export, sale and trafficking of the chairs. The filing of the FIRs was critical: it gave India’s diplomatic request the formal criminal investigation backing that French authorities would need to justify intervening in a scheduled auction on French soil.Why this mattersThe Paris intervention is the first time in over a decade of continuous international auctions — across more than 100 sales since 2009, fetching an estimated Rs 40-50 crore — that an overseas auction of Chandigarh heritage furniture has been stalled by official government action, that criminal cases have been filed over such outflow and that India has formally initiated a repatriation process for any of the pieces. Previous interventions, including advance representations to the MEA and Ministry of Culture ahead of the Brussels auction of June 18 — where seven pieces sold for Rs 1.6 crore despite 48 hours’ written notice — had yielded no preventive action.The breakthrough has also exposed the legal pathway that previous responses had missed. France’s status as a UNIDROIT Convention signatory means that India’s criminal cases and formal government request create a legal obligation on French authorities to engage — a lever that the 1972 Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, under which the Archaeological Survey of India twice ruled that Chandigarh furniture does not qualify for protection, had never provided.