No end yet to Rahul Gandhi’s gotra saga

The Rahul Gandhi ‘gotra’ saga has not ended. Those who thought Gandhi had settled the matter once and for all, are sadly mistaken.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje latched onto the controversy and said Gandhi had misled the people by revealing the ‘gotra’ of his maternal grandfather, a Dattatreya Kaul Bramhin.

"But this is the ‘gotra’ of his maternal grandfather Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. He should have revealed the ‘gotra’ of his father (Rajiv Gandhi) or the ‘gotra’ of his grandfather (Feroz Gandhi, who had none being a Parsi). In Hindu customs, the ‘gotra’ of the father is followed and not that of the maternal grandfather.

The priests in Pushkar said Rahul Gandhi had no clue about what his ‘gotra’ was and it was the priest, Rajnath Kaul -- a Kashmiri Pandit -- who revealed the same.

The priests at the shrine have documented the ‘gotras’ of prominent people. So, it was revealed that the ‘gotra’ Nehru had its origin in Kashmir as the family lived near a canal (‘nahar’).

Some people in the know said since Rajiv Gandhi's father was a Parsi, he could never have had a Hindu ‘gotra’. Though Rajiv Gandhi proclaimed even in his lifetime that he was a Hindu and even his last rites were performed by Hindu Vedic tradition, yet he had no ‘gotra’ of his own.

"Rajiv Gandhi's mother Indira married a Parsi, but a woman is recognised by the ‘gotra’ of her husband after marriage; in this case, since Feroze Gandhi was a Parsi, she had no Hindu ‘gotra’," pointed out Avadh Behari Vaishnav, a local priest.