Now, the real test for Bobby Jindal

Published : Nov 16, 2007 00:00 IST

Bobby Jindal will become the youngest Governor in U.S. history when he takes oath of office in January 2008. - TIM MUELLER/AP

Bobby Jindal will become the youngest Governor in U.S. history when he takes oath of office in January 2008. - TIM MUELLER/AP

Jindal is the first Indian American to win a gubernatorial election in the U.S., but there are concerns about his silence on racism.

Bobby Jindal will

IN late October, 36-year-old Piyush Bobby Jindal won the gubernatorial election in Louisiana. Jindal, whose family migrated to the United States from Punjab in India, is the first Indian American Governor in U.S. history. Indian American groups across the country greeted his victory. The Indian American Leadership Initiative put out the most amusing statement, Bobby Jindal replaces the Mardi Gras Indians as the best known Indian from Louisiana.

A spokesperson for the National Federation of Indian-American Associations said, It is a great moment in the history of America when someone who looks like us becomes the Governor of Louisiana. We should all be dancing in the streets to display our pride. Jindals victory, however, had little to do with his being Indian American. A long-time conservative Republican, he rapidly ascended from being a George W. Bush appointee to a Congressman to Governor in little more than a decade. When his victory was announced, Bush hastened to congratulate him for his incredible honour. Jindal is a fervent advocate of the U.S-led occupation of Iraq.

Jindal was born in Baton Rouge in 1971 to graduate-student parents. Attracted by the television show The Brady Bunch, four-year-old Piyush Jindal took the name of one of its characters, Bobby. As a teenager he converted to Roman Catholicism; his parents remain Hindus. All this indicates his remarkable drive. This self-direction was soon profitably yoked to an insatiable ambition. A Rhodes scholarship at the University of Oxford followed college at the prestigious Brown University. Armed with the best academic credentials, Jindal joined the global consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. While at Oxford, Jindal studied Political Science, and it was politics that drew him away from the world of money.

In 1995, 24-year-old Jindal was appointed head of Louisianas Department of Health and Hospitals. Within two years, his stewardship erased the agencys considerable budget at enormous human cost. Louisiana dropped from 48th to 50th (last) in the national health care rankings. Louisianas own health care agency reports that part of the problem was the slashing of funding for a robust set of state hospitals and outpatient primary care facilities. These are the very sections that Jindal sliced in order to bring his agency into fiscal health.

Jindals fiscal success found admirers at the White House, where he was brought to head the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, the government health insurance system. The commission provided no final recommendations for the systems reform. However, it suggested that the government raise the eligibility age for access to the system, which would mean that one would have to be older before being able to join the insurance scheme. As the commission stalled, Jindal returned to Louisiana to run the State university system. Before he could settle in, the White House called him back to Washington D.C. to be the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But again, before he could get going, he returned to Louisiana to run for Governor against popular Democrat Kathleen Babineaux Blanco in 2003. The establishment endorsed Jindal, as Bushs proxy, but he could not defeat Blanco. Jindal nevertheless won a safe Republican seat to Congress the following year. As soon as he won this seat, he quietly began his campaign against Blanco, which meant that he spent a lot of time in Louisiana and tried to make few waves in the Congress. He did, however, cast some crucial votes against Bills on medical insurance that would have crossed pharmaceutical companies, his major financial backers.

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, and the very poor recovery planning in its aftermath dented Blancos popularity. Jindal remained silent during this period, speaking banalities rather than making any direct assault on the shabby reconstruction effort, which would have also indicted his patron, Bush. Blancos tarnished star forced her to withdraw from the gubernatorial race in 2007, which left the field open to Jindal.

One reason Jindal did not defeat Blanco in 2003 is that he was unable to draw the full weight of the white vote. Many conservative whites preferred to vote for a white, Cajun (native Louisianan) Democrat than an Indian American, albeit born in Louisiana, conservative Republican. David Duke, leader of the virulently racist Ku Klux Klan, won 44 per cent of the Republican vote in a 1990 primary election (60 per cent of the white vote) here. A year later, Duke repeated this feat and bragged, I won my constituency. I won 55 per cent of the white vote. Despite having the second largest African American population in the U.S., Louisianas politics are structured around the ability of the State-wide candidate to draw in the white vote.

Racist vigilante violence marks the States history. After the Civil War ended in 1865, for example, some legislators considered a change in the States Constitution that might allow blacks the franchise. Recalcitrant citizens formed the White League, whose violent tactics succeeded in ending any talk of equality. It was in New Orleans that Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was removed from a train in 1892 because he sat in a whites only section. The Plessy v Ferguson case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that blacks and whites should have separate facilities although these should be equal the separate but equal statute.

Hurricane Katrina provided

In New Orleans again, a black man, Oliver Brown, began a court case to get his son, Earl, into an all-white school. Eventually, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Brown v The Board of Education that segregation of this kind, known as Jim Crow, is illegal and should be abolished. Drawing energy from this decision, young Martin Luther King, Jr., and his fellow liberal clergy formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in New Orleans in 1957. In response, the White Citizens Council, an organisation of the landed white aristocracy of the region, announced, Integration is the Southern expression of Communism. King and others took the fight against racism to the doorstep of the enemy.

Hurricane Katrina revealed the rot of a racist, segregated society. Kings movement ended de jure segregation, but it did little against de facto segregation and inequality. Almost 20 per cent of Louisianas residents live beneath the poverty line, and a dramatic number of blacks live not only in poverty but also in jail. The incarceration rate in New Orleans, where most blacks in the State live, is twice that of the average U.S. rate: 1,480 prisoners for every 100,000 residents of the city.

Katrina tore through the city and State, exposing inequality and shocking the nation. Jindal, then a Congressman, held his tongue. His main carp was not against the Bush administration, which had sent the bulk of the States National Guard to Iraq, and so away from their posts when the disaster struck, nor was it against the long history of inequality revealed by the aftermath. Jindal decided to speak out against the red-tape of government response.

Katrina, which had come to mean the racism of the federal and State government, provided the young Congressman with an opportunity to champion less government and more faith-based reconstruction solutions. No word about the dispossession of his fellow citizens, and little care that the white elites were now moving to grab the land which once housed a large black population. Scott Crow, who worked in the reconstruction of New Orleans, recalls how white militias roamed the city after Katrina, making sure to run the blacks out of town: These white militias made it their jobs to secure law and order in the absence of the police. Their brand of justice was to intimidate any black person walking on the street alone, or in any number that was smaller than the militia. Blancos inaction compromised her; Jindals silence on issues of racism enamoured him to a section of the white voters.

As the election campaign heated up, a terrible incident in the town of Jena brought national attention to the enduring racism in Louisiana. When white students intimidated black students at Jena High School by hanging nooses on a tree and by pointing shot guns at them, the school authorities blamed the black students for making trouble. The police joined the administration and in the course of an altercation jailed six black students, all teenagers. The Jena case angered the nation. On September 20, thousands of people converged in the town to demand the release of the six students.

Jindal, in the thick of his election battle, took a strong stand against the demonstrations. We certainly dont need any outside agitators coming in here, he said. The phrase outside agitator has a long lineage in the anti-Civil Rights movement and within the White Citizens Councils. Jindals heavy-handed code sent a strong message to the racist vote that he could be trusted not to pander to the black population. Jena is in the LaSalle Parish, whose white voters overwhelmingly voted for David Duke in 1991. This time Jindal carried that vote, winning the parish with a handy 55 per cent; his closest opponent Walter Boasso won short of 15 per cent. Dont let anyone talk bad about Louisiana, Jindal said as he claimed his victory. In other words, do not talk about racism. Those days are officially over.

A few days after the victory, Rev. Nehemiah Thompson of the National Association of Asian Indian Christians wrote a letter to The New York Times. Thompsons advice was simple, Go easy on conservatism. Ideology is a luxury of the upper class. But rebuild New Orleans. Care about the poor, the children, the elderly, the unemployed, blacks and Hispanics. Jindals programme, however, opposes stem cell research and abortion and is in favour of faith-based public policy and corporate solutions to social problems. His election coffers were lined by oil and petroleum magnates.

Other Indian Americans share Thompsons concerns. Deepa Iyer, head of the South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow says, Bobby Jindal should not get a free pass solely because he is of Indian descent. She is concerned about his civil rights record. During his time in Congress, Jindal voted against hate crimes legislation and for strict immigration enforcement. As the Governor of Louisiana, Deepa Iyer says, Jindal will have to confront some of these issues. But will his confrontation be in the vein of Bush, or as Thompson put it, will Jindal teach and practice what Jesus taught: non-violence, compassion for the poor and the oppressed and healing of sick [health care for all]?

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