He changed his first name from Piyush to Bobby and converted to Christianity in high school. Bobby Jindal assimilated, shed the hyphen in Indian-American, and embraced his American identity.
“To put this in perspective, my parents came to this country 45 years ago; they came here for freedom and opportunity,” Jindal told Fox News Tuesday night. “I don’t think in a million years they would have ever imagined that I’d be governor, or that one day I would be running for president of the United States.”
Research shows Indian-Americans are the most heavily Democratic Asian group in the country.
“Bobby is very, very, very conservative, and over time he’s just gotten more and more conservative,” said Puri with USINPAC. “[The] Indian-American community’s not. They’re a fiscally conservative, socially liberal community.”
Bobby Jindal, the unhyphenated, Republican American is not the Indian American community’s favorite person these days.