Hush descended when Gandhi memorabilia came up for sale

A sudden hush descended on the tiny room in the Antiquorum Auctioneers auction house in Manhattan as soon as Lot No. 364--Mahatma Gandhi's five prized personal items--came up for sale.

It was shortly after 3 PM(0130 IST Friday) and a slide show of Gandhi was displayed with a recording of piano music and one of the most contentious auctions that set off an international tempest whose outcome was awaited with bated breath in India began.

The bidders included a dozen people in the room, 30 people on the phone, and about two dozen people who submitted written bids. For the first time, the auction house required bidders to submit bank references.

Before the auction began, 60 bidders had registered, from Australia, Germany, Austria, India, Canada and the US, among other countries. In comparison, there were only six registered bidders in October for a watch belonging to Albert Einstein, which sold for almost 600,000 USD.

The auction room at 595 Madison Avenue was thick with finely dressed bidders, a throng of journalists and a lawyer for the owner of Gandhi's memorabilia James Otis, who was trying to stop the auction after having second thoughts.

The bidders — a mix of Indian-born business executives and die-hard timepiece collectors — began filling a fifth-floor room of the auction house, which specializes in watches.

In the end, after days of controversy that reverberated in India, the lot sold for 1.8 million USD to Vijay Mallya, an Indian liquor and airline magnate.

The controversy over the auction drew comparisons to an incident at Christie’s in Paris last month in which a Chinese collector said he was the winning bidder for Qing Dynasty bronze sculptures but refused to pay, saying he was sabotaging the auction because the works had been looted in the 19th century.

While the Gandhi items were believed to have been legitimately obtained, both sales pitted auction houses against governments that could ultimately do little more than protest.

The five objects took up half of a glass display case, atop a yellowed copy of the Jan. 30, 1948, issue of an Ohio newspaper, The Piqua Daily Call, with the headline: "Gandhi Shot and Killed Today.” Himadri Roy, 72, an engineer and real estate investor who had flown in from Montreal, had tears in his eyes as he examined the case and recalled meeting Gandhi as a 10-year-old in India.

For the first time, the auction house required bidders to submit bank references. "We are concerned about what happened at Christie’s," Antiquorum’s chairman Robert Maron was quoted by New York Times as having said.

At the point when the bidding reached one million dollars, the contest essentially narrowed to Tony Bedi, representing Mallya, and Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s auction house, representing a former Indian cricketer Dilip Doshi, who was said to be interested in donating the items to the Indian government. The price continued to rise until Bedi made the winning 1.8 million USD bid, and the room burst into applause.

The proceedings were nearly disrupted about 2:30 PM when Otis' lawyer Ravi Batra entered the auction house to attempt to stop the sale. Julien Schaerer, an official of the auction house, which would not disclose its commission, said Otis had entered a "legally binding agreement" to sell the items.

Employees escorted Batra from the building. He later said that Otis did not plan to challenge the sale if Mallya agreed to turn the items over to the Indian government, although it was not immediately clear whether he would do so.

Maron said he was delighted that the items would return to India for public viewing. "We had hoped that would be the result," he said.