In a Southern U.S. state, immigrants' son takes over
E-Mail Article
Printer-Friendly
3-Column Format
Translate
Share Article
Text Size
NEW ORLEANS: The first words from Bobby Jindal to his supporters after he won the Louisiana governor's race on Saturday night were not about his victory, but LSU's triumph over Auburn the same day.
The message could not have been clearer: I'm one of you, a normal, red-blooded football-loving Louisiana guy. It is a theme that seems to have informed the youthful Republican congressman's every step, from his decision at age 4 to jettison his given name of Piyush for that of a character in the television series "The Brady Bunch" to the attentive faith-infused courting of conservatives that led to his victory on Saturday with 54 percent of the vote.
Jindal's efforts only highlight, though, what is glaringly obvious to anyone who sees and hears the slight 36-year-old son of immigrants from India. He is a highly unusual politician, having become the nation's first Indian-American governor in a Southern state where race is inseparable from politics.
Still, Jindal offered something few others could to a state that is on its knees. Louisiana is more desperate than ever, a place where the glaring needs of its citizens evidently trumped considerations of race and ethnicity.
He has taken an already lengthy public policy résumé, mostly in health care, along with sterling educational credits (Brown University and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar) and come back home instead of using his credentials as a ticket to escape, as many other accomplished Louisianans do.
Today in Americas
Louisiana — largely impoverished, undereducated and unhealthy — has been left behind by whatever national prosperity has accrued in recent decades. Hurricane Katrina only knocked it back further. Jindal, outside the Louisiana mainstream but within the well-to-do 21st-century American one, seemed to offer a ticket to the latter.
Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of "intelligent design" as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes.
His ascent has delighted many Indian-Americans, who have never seen one of their own elected to such a high political position. Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S.-India Political Action Committee, predicted that Jindal would surprise doubters with the depth of his understanding on policy issues. Others, however, are cautious, saying that Jindal is out of the mainstream on issues that matter to Indian-Americans.
"The fact that he's of Indian ancestry is a subject of jubilation," said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking of the way Jindal has been portrayed in the Indian-American press. "But there's a very shallow appreciation of who he really is. Once you scratch the surface, it's really unpleasant."
Jindal's platform, though conscientiously detailed, was hardly revolutionary, and the campaign itself was a study in caution. Louisiana's rickety fiscal structure went mostly ignored. And Jindal, intent on not jeopardizing a big lead in the polls, shunned reporters.
Though he was criticized during the campaign for talking relatively little about hurricane recovery in still-suffering New Orleans, he said Sunday he hoped to secure more federal assistance for homeowners and planned to meet with President George W. Bush to discuss the region's needs.
Piyush Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge to Hindu parents who had come to the United States six months before so his mother could pursue a graduate degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father was an engineer from the Punjab region of India, the only one of nine siblings to attend high school. The younger Jindal, growing up in Baton Rouge, was not expected to come home from school with anything less than 100 on tests. Public high school in Baton Rouge was followed by Brown, where Jindal was Phi Beta Kappa, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism that Jindal has described in transformative terms. "I draw my definition of integrity from my Christian faith," Jindal said during the campaign. "In my faith, you give 100 percent of yourself to God."
"But we live in a pluralistic state," he was careful to add.
After Oxford, a well-paid stint at the Washington consultants McKinsey and Company was followed by an interview for the job of secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals with the newly elected Republican governor of Louisiana, Mike Foster, in 1995. Jindal was 24; it was the biggest department in state government, and it was in serious financial trouble. He got the job despite Foster's initial skepticism, made cuts and restored the department to financial stability; Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of uninsured, however.
