UNITED KINGDOM, September 14, 2016 (by Arjit Barman, Economics Times): Britain’s newest peer swore his oath of allegiance on an ancient book–the Rig Veda. At 46, Jitesh Gadhia is currently the youngest Briton of Indian origin in the House of Lords, where the average age of 800 peers is about 69. An investment banker of repute, Gadhia has been part of some of the largest investment flows between the UK and India and also helped craft Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech last November to a full house at Wembley Stadium.
A rainmaker with storied European franchises like ABN and Barclays and private equity giant Blackstone, Gadhia has also been responsible for several headline-grabbing, cross-border deals during the buyout boom years of 2000-7, including the biggest involving an Indian business-Tata Steel’s acquisition of Corus.
Now the banker and businessman of Gujarati descent has made history by pledging allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II using the ancient Vedic text of the Rig Veda, considered the world’s oldest religious scripture in continuous use and dating back to 1500 BC. For some years now, new members have been permitted to choose a religious text other than the Bible, but no one has used the Rig Veda before. In the US, Keith Ellison became the first Muslim in Congress in 2007, taking his oath with a Quran that had been once owned by Thomas Jefferson, according to the Washington Post. (Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard took her oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita.)
The 167-year-old first edition copy of the Rig Veda that Gadhia will also be gifting to the Parliament has special significance. It was edited and published in 1849 by Max Mueller, the German academic and Indophile who lived and studied for most of his life in Oxford and was one of the pioneers of Sanskrit and Vedic studies in Europe. His compilation of the Rig Veda, in the traditional Devanagari script, was published under the patronage of the East India Company which paid Rs 900,000 to support the effort.
“I wanted a copy of the original Sanskrit text but my research took me to Max Mueller and finally my intense search bore fruit and I managed to source it from a rare books specialist,” Gadhia told ET from London, soon after the ceremony that was attended by his extended family, friends and fellow parliamentarians cutting across party lines.