[Sreekar]

Bobby Jindal becomes Governor of Louisiana
(source:The Times of India: Breaking news, views, reviews, cricket from across India.)

Bobby Jindal, son of Indian immigrants, became the first non-White and the youngest Governor of the US state of Louisiana when he impressively defeated his opponents in the gubernatorial poll.

The victory of 36-year-old Oxford-educated Jindal, who is currently a Republican Congressman, shows the growing political clout of the Indian-American community which has been very active during the last few years and has been major contributor to political campaigns financially as also in providing volunteers.

In winning Saturday’s election, Jindal polled more than 50 per cent votes, thus avoiding the run-off poll which was scheduled for November 17 if no candidate had won half the votes polled.

Jindal, who had lost the Governor's race four years ago to Kathleen Blanco, this time, defeated a slate of 11 opponents including two Democrats, State Senator Walter Boasso, Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell and an independent businessman John Georges in a closely watched election.

Jindal got 53 per cent votes with 625,036 ballots cast in his favour - more than enough to avoid the November 17 runoff.

Boasso won 18 per cent with 208,690 votes; Georges got 14 per cent with 1167,477 votes; and Campbell had 13 per cent with 141,346 votes. Eight candidates divided the rest.

"Let's give our homeland, the great state of Louisiana, a fresh start," Jindal said after his victory.

Until he takes over as Governor in January next year, he would continue to be Congressman from highly conservative First Congressional Districts in suburban New Orleans.

Blanco decided against contesting the post following sharp criticism over the handling of aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Jindal pledged to fight corruption and rid the state of those "feeding at the public trough."

"They can either go quietly or they can go loudly, but either way, they will go," he said and added he would call the Legislature into special session to address ethics reform.

After the result was made known, Georges said, "I'm asking all of our supporters to get behind our new Governor."

-Thanks much,
Sreekar

[chanda_s]

what has he promised to do for the indian diaspora and migrants?

[Sreekar]

Chanda Sir,
I'm not sure whether he has any agenda for migrants but his first plank of his plan is to end corruption. Louisiana is one of the top 5 corrupt states in the USA. He announced the “Ending Corruption” comprehensive policy proposal on ethics reform, detailing 31 specific policy initiatives to make government more transparent and accountable.

Here is one of the most impressive statements from his speech " Changing the political culture in our state is job one. If we fail to do this, we fail. It is that simple. This is where real change begins. Corruption in Louisiana is a tradition that must be put to rest – once and for all. For too long, corruption in our state has eroded the confidence of businesses, deterred investment in Louisiana and hurt our economic development. Corruption may be part of our past, but it will not be part of our future. Some say that this is a nice goal, but it can’t be done. While I understand why folks may be skeptical, I completely reject the notion that we can’t clean up our government. If we can’t clean up our own government, then shame on us. We're going to change the corruption in this state. We cannot tolerate corruption or incompetence. We can do better, we must do better, and we will do better.”

Truly speaking, it's very rare that we see an agenda in political campaign which includes "ending corruption" in our part of the world (India) or for that sake any part of the world. Hopefully, he will keep up his promise.

-Thanks much,
Sreekar

[chanda_s]

from what i gather the indian community is not overjoyed or overexcited at his victory; especially his changing his faith to catholicism and publicly declaring that he did it to further his political ambitions.

what does this victory mean for the indian community there?

[Sreekar]

Originally Posted by chanda_s

what does this victory mean for the indian community there?

Chanda Sir,
Well it’s an eye opener to every Indian immigrant kid or for that matter any immigrant kid here in US; if they put in right hard work, they can go great places.

Indian community in Louisiana (approximately there are around 10,000 Indian immigrants) are really happy & excited that he got elected. Truly speaking, even though most of the Indian community supports Democrats in general, they voted for Bobby Jindal who is a staunch Republican.

Change of religion:

I agree that Jindal is a Catholic convert from Hinduism. But he didn't change his religion just before the elections or just before entering the political field. He was student at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. While a student at Oxford he was very active in the Catholic Chaplaincy and helped to lead the University's Catholic Bible Study. This was before he was appointed to lead the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals at age of 24.

I personally feel that, whatever might be his motives in changing his religion but his agenda is really impressive and hope's he keeps his promises.

-Thanks much,
Sreekar

[chocochipp_in]

It is good news in the sense that as an Indian it gives me a sense of pride..that Indian immigrants are making their presence felt in political spheres as well..it cudnot have been easy for an immigrant (even if he/she has been born n brot up in US) to have done this.

[Sreekar]

Should we be proud of Bobby Jindal?
(TimeofIndia Editorial: Shashi Tharoor)


The election of Bobby Jindal as governor of the US state of Louisiana has been greeted exultantly by Indians and Indian-Americans around the world. There’s no question that this is an extraordinary accomplishment: a young Indian-American, just 36 years old, not merely winning an election but doing so on the first ballot by receiving more votes than his 11 rivals combined, and that too in a state not noticeably friendly to minorities. Bobby Jindal will now be the first Indian-American governor in US history, and the youngest currently serving chief executive of an American state. These are distinctions of which he can legitimately be proud, and it is not surprising that Indians too feel a vicarious sense of shared pride in his remarkable ascent.

But is our pride misplaced? Who is Bobby Jindal and what does he really stand for?

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Indian migrants in America: though no sociologist, i’ll call them the atavists and the assimilationists. The atavists hold on to their original identities as much as possible, especially outside the workplace; in speech, dress, food habits, cultural preferences, they are still much more Indian than American. The assimilationists, on the other hand, seek assiduously to merge into the American mainstream; they acquire a new accent along with their visa, and adopt the ways, clothes, diet and recreational preferences of the Americans they see around them. (Of course, there are the in-betweens, but we’ll leave them aside for now.) Class has something to do with which of the two major categories an Indian immigrant falls into; so does age, since the newer generation of Indians, especially those born in America, inevitably tend to gravitate to the latter category.

Bobby Jindal is an assimilationist’s dream. Born to relatively affluent professionals in Louisiana, he rejected his Indian name (Piyush) as a very young child, insisting that he be called Bobby, after a (white) character on the popular TV show ‘The Brady Bunch’. His desire to fit in to the majority-white society he saw around him soon manifested itself in another act of rejection: Bobby spurned the Hindusim into which he was born and, as a teenager, converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith of most white Louisianans. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of this, and it is a measure of his precocity that his parents did not balk at his wishes despite his extreme youth. The boy was clearly gifted, and he soon had a Rhodes scholarship to prove it. But he was also ambivalent about his identity: he wanted to be seen as a Louisianan, but his mirror told him he was also an Indian. The two of us won something called an ‘Excelsior Award’ once from the

Network of Indian Professionals in the US, and his acceptance speech on the occasion was striking — obligatory references to the Indian values of his parents, but a speech so American in tone and intonation that he mangled the Indian name of his own brother. There was no doubt which half of the hyphen this Indian-American leaned towards.

But there are many ways to be American, and it’s interesting which one Bobby chose. Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathise with other people of colour, identifying their lot with other immigrants, the poor, the underclass. Vinita Gupta, in Oklahoma, another largely white state, won her reputation as a crusading lawyer by taking up the case of illegal immigrants exploited by a factory owner (her story will shortly be depicted by Hollywood, with Halle Berry playing the Indian heroine). Bhairavi Desai leads a taxi drivers’ union; Preeta Bansal, who grew up as the only non-white child in her school in Nebraska, became New York’s Solicitor General and now serves on the Commission for Religious Freedom. None of this for Bobby. Louisiana’s most famous city, New Orleans, was a majority black town, at least until Hurricane Katrina destroyed so many black lives and homes, but there is no record of Bobby identifying himself with the needs or issues of his state’s black people. Instead, he sought, in a state with fewer than 10,000 Indians, not to draw attention to his race by supporting racial causes. Indeed, he went well beyond trying to be non-racial (in a state that harboured notorious racists like the Ku Klux Klansman David Duke); he cultivated the most conservative elements of white Louisiana society. With his widely-advertised piety (he asked his Indian wife, Supriya, to convert as well, and the two are regular churchgoers), Bobby Jindal adopted positions on hot-button issues that place him on the most conservative fringe of the Republican Party. Most Indian-Americans are in favour of gun control, support a woman’s right to choose abortion, advocate immigrants’ rights, and oppose school prayer (for fear that it would marginalise non-Christians). On every one of these issues, Bobby Jindal is on the opposite side. He’s not just conservative; on these questions, he is well to the right of his own party.

That hasn’t stopped him, however, from seeking the support of Indian-Americans. Bobby Jindal has raised a small fortune from them, and when he last ran (unsuccessfully) for governor in 2004, an army of Indian-American volunteers from outside the state turned up to campaign for him. Many seemed unaware of his political views; it was enough for them that he was Indian. At his Indian-American fundraising events, Bobby is careful to downplay his extreme positions and play up his heritage, a heritage that plays little part in his appeal to the Louisiana electorate. Indian-Americans, by and large, accept this as the price of political success in white America: it’s just good to have “someone like us” in such high office, whatever views he professes to get himself there.

So Indians beam proudly at another Indian-American success story to go along with Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, Hargobind Khorana and Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri. But none of these Indian Americans expressed attitudes and beliefs so much at variance with the prevailing values of their community. Let us be proud that a brown-skinned man with an Indian name has achieved what Bobby Jindal has. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that we should be proud of what he stands for.

-Thanks much,
Sreekar

[Sreekar]

Indian-American sworn in as Louisiana governor
(source:Breaking News, World News, Business & Finance News | Reuters.com)

Republican Bobby Jindal was sworn in on Monday as governor of Louisiana to become the first Indian-American elected head of a U.S. state.

The Oxford-educated conservative vowed in a speech at the state capitol to clean up Louisiana's notorious political corruption and to speed up the state's recovery from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
"In our past, too many of our politicians looked out for themselves," said Jindal, who is the state's first non-white governor since Reconstruction in the 1870s. "We must win a war on corruption and incompetence in government."

Jindal, 36, was in his second term as a U.S. congressman when won the governorship in an October election in his second try for the office.
Democrat Kathleen Blanco defeated Jindal in the 2003 gubernatorial race, but did not seek a second term when her support plummeted after the government's stumbling rescue and recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina.

The storm flooded most of New Orleans, where hundreds died and chaos broke out as stranded flood victims waited days for help. Many residents who fled Katrina have not returned.

Jindal urged storm exiles to return home and "make Louisiana's rebirth your own priority."

He said the hurricanes provided a chance to build a better Louisiana
"Our economy was behind before the storms. And now, for reasons beyond our earthly comprehension, this opportunity, this mandate, has been placed on our generation."

Jindal is the first Indian-American elected governor of a U.S. state, but another, Kris Kolluri, served as governor for a day in New Jersey in 2006 when Gov. Jon Corzine was away.

Jindal, who first name is Piyush, is the son of well-educated Indians who emigrated to Baton Rouge shortly before he was born.
He converted to Catholicism from his parents' Hindu faith and frequently cites his Christian beliefs.

"Praise be to almighty God," he said at the start of Monday's speech.
Jindal's rise in state politics began at the age of 24 when he was selected by then-Gov. Mike Foster to head the state's Department of Health and Hospitals.

He served in several government positions and, after his unsuccessful run for governor, won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004, taking over the office vacated when David Vitter was elected to the Senate.

-Thanks much,
Sreekar