The Brown Blessing

Hearing his policies and not his name, Louisiana’s recently inaugurated governor sounds like a traditional Southern conservative. He has a track record of supporting permanent military presence in Iraq, legislating against a woman’s right to an abortion, allowing government surveillance without a warrant, upholding tough immigration enforcement, shooting down gun control laws, and prohibiting human embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, the main reason Bobby Jindal—the state’s first minority governor since Reconstruction—catapulted to victory was that he was so utterly indistinguishable from the mostly white voting base.

Why, then, do so many Indian-Americans support him? After all, Indians voted for Kerry over Bush in the 2004 election by a four-to-one ratio, and are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. Jindal, however, is all business and no bleeding heart. As Times of India columnist Shashi Tharoor writes in his scathing piece “Should We Be Proud of Bobby Jindal?” “Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathize with other people of color, identifying their lot with other immigrants, the poor, the underclass… None of this for Bobby.” The unpleasant truth is that he’s a desi hero for the wrong reasons—lauded not for his beliefs but for his race.

This is not to say that Indians in the States don’t have their doubts about Jindal; some do. For many, though, any qualms over Jindal’s neoconservative politics are overcome by pride in his brown skin and the progress this supposedly signifies. Unfortunately, this perception is mostly wishful thinking. Unlike the immigrant families I know who still proudly hang diwali lanterns and shop at the local Bharat Bazaar, Jindal has done the best he can to assimilate by erasing his cultural origins. Changing his name as a child from the Punjabi Piyush to that of his favorite character on The Brady Bunch, converting from Hinduism to Christianity as a senior in high school (and later asking his wife to do the same), attending Brown University and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, working as a consultant at McKinsey, and adopting a flat Louisiana drawl—the only part of “Indian-American” he embodies lies after the hyphen.

This raises an unsettling question: does a minority have to “act white” to get elected? As is the case with many politicians, it’s hard to discern Jindal’s genuine beliefs from statements designed to cater to the average Louisiana voter. Although his broad platform promise to “end corruption in Louisiana” is universally appealing, you can bet that the more extreme viewpoints he dishes up to white Republicans get omitted from the soothing “heritage” speeches he gives at Indian-American fundraising dinners. Jindal has been very successful indeed at working his innate advantage and tapping the latent ethnic pride (some would call it racism) felt by other people of his color.

Race-based politics are nothing new, of course—you can trace the effect of racial issues on government all the way from the civil rights movement to the debate over Barack Obama’s “electability” raging today. Whether or not the Indian vote actually affected the election, however (the magnitude of Jindal’s victory makes it unlikely), it’s a pity that so many influential members of the Indian community unquestioningly followed the lead of a man with whom they shared only superficial similarities.

Reactions to Jindal by Indians in the homeland have been more negative than those in the American Diaspora. But the mentality there, as well as here, is telling. Following the news of Jindal’s win, the Times of India telephoned Bobby’s cousin Gulshan. “It’s a great honor not just for our family, but Punjab and the nation as well, [for] the son of this soil [to] have achieved something really big,” he said. Meanwhile, celebrations were erupting in Jindal’s ancestral village of Khanpura, as locals shared sweets and danced exultantly to bhangra music. Nobody asked what Jindal stood for.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.