A high profile election in Louisiana. The state gets a Republican governor. Its first nonwhite governor since reconstruction.
And Indian immigrants (known as Indian-Americans or Indo-Americans) get a new role model as a community, in an exceedingly high-profile way, comes of political age:
U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.
As anyone who knows Indian-Americans and anyone who has been fortune enough to visit The World’s Largest Democracy (India) can attest, many Indians hold, believe and steadfastly pursue the American dream. And here’s a textbook case of where it was achieved:
Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation’s youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday’s election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.
“My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana,” he said to cheers and applause at his victory party.
It’s a story of how working to achieve the American dream coincided with Louisiana voters’ “buyers’ remorse” over the performance — or, perhaps, rather, NON-performance — of the state’s hapless Hurricane Katrina-era governor:
The Oxford-educated Jindal had lost the governor’s race four years ago to Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He won a congressional seat in conservative suburban New Orleans a year later but was widely believed to have his eye on the governor’s mansion.
Blanco opted not to run for re-election after she was widely blamed for the state’s slow response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
“My administration has begun readying for this change and we look forward to helping with a smooth transition,” she said in a prepared statement. “I want to thank the people of Louisiana for the past four years, though there is still much work to do in my last few months as your governor.”
Jindal, who takes office in January, pledged to fight corruption and rid the state of those “feeding at the public trough,” revisiting a campaign theme.
“They can either go quietly or they can go loudly, but either way, they will go,” he said, adding that he would call the Legislature into special session to address ethics reform.
Indian immigrants have a long history in the United States, primarily dating from the 1900s, in which they overcame many obstacles to become a highly-influential and respected ingredient in the American melting pot.
Jindal does face some formidable challenges in office, but expect for his status as the nation’s youngest government and a member of a community that is increasingly getting a higher-profile in American culture to mean Jindal will be given prominence by the Republican Party, since his genuine ascent to power and influence comes at at time when the GOP is being portrayed as increasingly exclusionary.
Meanwhile, in a village in India, in the soil that grew the roots of what was to become Louisiana’s first Indian immigrant governor, it was party-time:
Celebrations erupted in Bobby Jindal’s ancestral Khanpura village on Sunday over his election as Governor of the US state of Louisiana with locals distributing sweets and performing bhangra.
As news trickled in that the 36-year-old Oxford-educated Jindal has won the gubernatorial race, his family members started distributing sweets in the neighbourhood.
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