Britain’s newest Indian-origin peer marked his entry into the House of Lords by swearing his oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II on the Rig Veda. The copy of the Rig Veda used by Jitesh Gadhia was edited and published in Devanagari script in 1849, by German academic Max Muller. The 49-year-old investment banker of Gujarati-origin had been nominated for his peerage as part of former PM David Cameron’s resignation honours list and he coincidentally took his oath on the same day Cameron announced his resignation as an MP. “History will judge him (Cameron) to have been a great reforming PM, who brought the country back from the brink of financial ruin. I will be joining parliament at a defining moment in British history as we grapple with the new realities post-Brexit,” said Gadhia. “I wanted a copy of the original Sanskrit text of the Rig Veda but my research took me to this edition,” he explained. Gadhia, board member of UK Government Investments Ltd, is well known in British Indian circles as a Conservative party donor. He had played an active role during PM Narendra Modi’s visit to UK last November. Along with other new peers, he dressed up in traditional red robes to take a writ from the serving monarch, called the Letters Patent.
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