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.

“We are really proud that Bobby has finally made it and won the Governor’s race. It’s a great honour not just for our family, but Punjab and the nation as well as the son of this soil have achieved something really big,” Bobby’s 37-year-old cousin Gulshan Jindal said over phone from Malerkotla.

He said the entire Khanpura village, from where he said Bobby’s father Amar Chand migrated to the US nearly four decades back, had erupted in joy on hearing the news.

Gulshan said since morning when television channels broke the news of Bobby’s victory, villagers have been queuing up outside the various houses of the Jindal family in Khanpura, close to Malerkotla.

People of the Punjab town performed the bhangra folk dance to celebrate Bobby’s victory.

And, indeed, it can never be insinuated by his most bitter critics (if he has any) that Jindal won the race due to any form of playing the ethnic card: he won it by smart and tireless politicking, as an earlier New York Times piece noted:

For months, the congressman has cultivated the rural areas where he lost in 2003, “witnessing” in remote Pentecostal churches, neutralizing his image of being hyperqualified — head of the state health department at 24, head of the university system at 28 and under secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services at 30 under President Bush — that did not help him the last time. In one recent debate, Mr. Jindal boasted that he had made 77 trips to north Louisiana since announcing his candidacy.

Insinuations about his excessive intellectual capacity are still being made. “It’s not going to be about the smartest person in this race,” Walter Boasso, a Democratic state senator and one of Mr. Jindal’s opponents, said recently. But such remarks do not seem to be catching on with voters apparently weary of bumbling at the Capitol in Baton Rouge and at City Hall in New Orleans.

This time, Mr. Jindal is aiming his multipoint plans at ethical reform in state government, schools and economic development, and attacks on his wonkishness have fallen flat. Mr. Jindal kept a low profile after Hurricane Katrina, but opponents are not attacking him for that either, perhaps because few others in Louisiana’s political class have stepped up.

Mr. Jindal told a group in Jefferson Parish this week that he had “150 specific proposals,” after rattling unflinchingly through a good many in a 12-minute speech.

He makes a particular case for a “war on corruption,” as he puts it, in Baton Rouge, proposing to tighten financial disclosures on lobbyists and legislators and to prohibit business relationships between legislators and the state. He promises to build up infrastructure like ports, to devote attention to research universities and promote technical training. He hardly mentions Mr. Bush, a sharp contrast to four years ago when he often boasted of his connections to the president.

The big Republican blog Powerline declares:

We were sorely disappointed in November 2003 when Republican Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco in his Louisiana gubernatorial bid. Jindal was then a 32-year-old wunderkind — a policy wonk with degrees from Brown and Oxford — whose parents emigrated from India to Baton Rouge before he was born. We celebrated the emergence of “Bubbas for Bobby” in the course of that campaign…

Jindal lost the 2003 gubernatorial election, but he was subsequently elected to Congress with a mere 78 percent of the vote in his suburban New Orleans district. In a dour season for Republicans, we are happy to note Jindal’s election yesterday as the governor of Louisiana with approximately 53 percent of the vote in a twelve-candidate field.

A PERSONAL NOTE:

As a student at Colgate University, I studied India and many things relating to it before going over to New Delhi to do an independent study project from January to May 1972. I interned for college credit on The Hindustan Times newspaper. I returned to New Delhi after getting my masters in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism to spend Sept. 1973-1975 as the Chicago Daily News’ highly-prolific stringer (my byline had my name and said Daily News Foreign Service) doing daily stories, long trend analysis pieces and even analysis columns that had my un-photogenic picture next to them.

After writing in Spain (for The Christian Science Monitor) I returned to work on the staff of two American newspapers. Since that time, and leaving the papers to go into the entertainment biz, I have traveled a lot and everywhere I go find and visit Indian communities in the U.S. (in particular to go to Indian restaurants).

It should be said that there has been an enormous blossoming of the Indian-American community in the United States where many parts of it have melted and melded into The Melting Pot. On a smaller scale, you can see it when you travel in the large number of well-visited and increasing number of Indian restaurants and Mom and Pop Indian grocery stores now in American cities.

But the highest profile examples are always in the media, entertainment or in politics. And you see this now…in its full glory. Jindal is a political turning point. And another one is in the prominence of CNN medical news “star” Sanjay Gupta, a second-generation Indian American physician who has become a major TV personality (and even has his “groupies.”)

With so much publicity, discussion and controversy about so many other parts of America, the Indian-American community has almost seemed under the radar.

But, as Jindal and Gupta show, those days are now over…

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