Opinion In the Race

Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is running for the post of US President, the first Indian-American to do so. He has said he cares little for that hyphenated identity, believing he is an American first. Indeed, much of his career as a trailblazing Republican candidate has been about affirming his conservative cred to middle America. Yet, for the Grand Old Party, not known to inspire much love in the minorities, he could have been proof of its relevance outside white America. Except that in 2015, in a crowded Republican field, his pitch for power seems an overreacher’s gamble.

Jindal’s parents emigrated to the United States in the 1960s. In many ways, he has been the poster boy of the American dream (without the accompanying identity confusions of the diaspora — the antithesis of a Jhumpa Lahiri character, if there ever was one). A Rhodes scholar, he returned to Louisiana from Oxford to hold important positions at the ridiculously young age of 24. In 2007, when he became Louisiana’s first non-white governor, he did so on the back of this glowing record. But his performance in his second term as governor has been seen to be disappointing.

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Seen as a man in a hurry to be the next big thing, to get to the next big job, his approval ratings in Louisiana are at an all-time low. His state’s finances are a disaster, but he has doggedly pandered to religious conservatives: he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, and favours a muscular, militant foreign policy. All that might have little effect, as polls show him to be the least popular of Republican candidates.

In the echo-chamber of Twitter, Indians are already mocking him for his discomfort about his roots with hashtags and cruel barbs about coconuts. Certainly, there is enough in Jindal’s career and politics to caution us against appropriating him as another NRI success story — and see it for what it is, a complicated transaction of race and ambition.