Piyush “Bobby” Jindal (born 10 June 1971) is an American politician who was Governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. He was the first Indian American to be elected governor of any state in the United States, and earlier served in the US House of Representatives. He sought the Republican nomination for President in 2016.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Piyush Jindal |
| Born | 10 June 1971, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States |
| Age | 55 |
| Nationality | American |
| Indian roots | Parents from Punjab |
| Education | Brown University (B.Sc., 1991); New College, Oxford (M.Litt., Rhodes Scholar) |
| Party | Republican |
| Offices | Governor of Louisiana (2008–2016); Member of the US House of Representatives (2005–2008) |
| Spouse | Supriya Jolly (m. 1997) |
| Children | 3 |
Early Life
He was born in Baton Rouge a few months after his parents arrived from India. His father, Amar, an engineer, came from a village in Punjab and was the only one of nine children to go beyond the fifth class at school; his mother, Raj, had come to Louisiana State University to study nuclear physics.
At the age of four he announced that he wished to be called Bobby, after a character in the television comedy The Brady Bunch. Brought up a Hindu, he became a Christian in his teens and was baptised a Catholic while at university.
Education
He graduated from Brown University at twenty with honours in biology and public policy. He was accepted by both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School but chose to go to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a degree in politics. He then worked for the consulting firm McKinsey.
Career
A young administrator
In 1996, aged twenty-four, he was appointed Secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, the largest department of the state government, and turned a large deficit in its health programme for the poor into a surplus. He went on to run a national commission on the future of Medicare, to be president of the University of Louisiana System at twenty-eight, and to serve as an assistant secretary in the US Department of Health under President George W. Bush.
Congress and Governor
He narrowly lost the election for Governor in 2003. The next year he was elected to the US House of Representatives from a suburban New Orleans district. In 2007 he won the governorship outright in the first round, taking office in January 2008 at thirty-six, then the youngest governor in the country.
- **Ethics:** he pushed through new rules on the financial disclosures of officials in a state notorious for corruption
- **Disasters:** his handling of Hurricane Gustav in 2008 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was widely praised
- **Education:** he expanded school vouchers and charter schools
- **Budget:** his tax cuts and refusal to raise revenue were followed by repeated shortfalls and deep cuts to universities and hospitals, and he left office unpopular
He was re-elected in 2011 with two-thirds of the vote.
National ambitions
He was often mentioned as a future President. In June 2015 he entered the contest for the Republican nomination for 2016, but never rose in the polls and withdrew in November.
Views on Identity
He has said he dislikes “hyphenated” labels and considers himself simply an American, a stance that drew criticism from some Indian Americans.
Personal Life
He married Supriya Jolly, an engineer born in New Delhi, in 1997. They have a daughter and two sons; he delivered the youngest himself at home in 2006 when the baby arrived before the ambulance. Since leaving office he has worked in business and written on health policy.
Featured image: Bobby Jindal speaking in Oklahoma City, May 2015. Photo by Michael Vadon, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
