Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has assimilated to American culture so well that there’s barely a trace of his Indian heritage left, a Washington Post article suggested Tuesday.
“Jindal’s status as a conservative of color helped propel his meteoric rise in the Republican Party — from an early post in the George W. Bush administration to two terms in Congress and now a second term as Louisiana governor — and donors from Indian American groups fueled his first forays into politics,” the Post reported.
“Yet many see him as a man who has spent a lifetime distancing himself from his Indian roots,” the report added.
The governor’s office was unimpressed with the Post’s many insinuations.
“For years, liberals have attacked Governor Jindal for not being brown or Indian enough for their liking,” Jindal spokesman Kyle Plotkin told the Washington Examiner’s media desk. “Liberals are fixated on race.”
“Governor Jindal is proud of his heritage. He believes we need to stop fixating on race and hyphenated Americans. We are all Americans,” he said.
The Post report documented how Jindal decided at a young age that he wanted to go by the name “Bobby,” explaining that he got the idea from the Brady Bunch TV show. Jindal later converted from Hinduism to Christianity, specifically to Catholicism, the article recorded.
Jindal and his wife were also “quick to say in a ’60 Minutes’ interview in 2009 that they do not observe many Indian traditions — although they had two wedding ceremonies, one Hindu and one Catholic,” the Post reported. “He said recently he wants to be known simply as an American, not an Indian American.”
The article then quotes Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who said, “There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal.”
The rest of the report is a detailed, in-depth review of Jindal’s roots and his path to Louisiana governor, and his likely 2016 presidential ambitions.
Jindal’s Indian heritage has long been the target of certain media commentators, with at least a few pundits in the past letting slip with some racially charged comments.
In January, human rights attorney and MSNBC contributor Arsalan Iftikhar accused the Republican governor of trying to “scrub the brown off his skin” ahead of a potential 2016 bid.
“I think Gov. Jindal is protesting a bit too much,” Iftikhar said, referring to Jindal repeating dubious claims that France is home to certain “no-go zones” where Sharia law reigns supreme. “He might be trying to scrub some of the brown off his skin as he runs to the right in a Republican presidential exploratory bid.”
“I think it’s the worst common denominator of American politics to marginalize any minority demographic group,” he added. “I’m pretty sure that Gov. Jindal will come to his senses, hopefully, in the next couple of days.”
MSNBC apologized later for Iftikhar’s remarks.
In 2013, Vox’s Matt Yglesias suggested that Jindal was not only unintelligent, but that anyone who said otherwise was also likely engaging in racial stereotyping.
“Is Bobby Jindal’s reputation for intelligence anything other than ethnic stereotyping?” he asked on social media.
