Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971) is an American politician who served as the 55th governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. A member of the Republican Party, Jindal previously served as a U.S. representative from Louisiana from 2005 to 2008, and served as chair of the Republican Governors Association from 2012 to 2013.
In 1995, Jindal was appointed secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. In 1999, he was appointed president of the University of Louisiana System. At 28, Jindal became the youngest person to hold the position. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Jindal as principal adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Jindal first ran for governor of Louisiana in 2003, but lost in the runoff election to Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the second Indian American in Congress, and he was reelected in 2006. To date, he is the only Indian American Republican to have ever served in Congress. Jindal ran for governor again in the 2007 election and won. Jindal was re-elected in 2011 in a landslide, winning more than 65 percent of the vote. He was the first Indian American governor in U.S. history, and was the only Indian American governor in U.S. history until Nikki Haley became Governor of South Carolina in 2011.
On June 24, 2015, Jindal announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. He suspended his campaign in November 2015, subsequently announcing his support for Marco Rubio. He finished his term as governor in January 2016.
Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to immigrant Indian Punjabi Hindu parents. He is the first of two sons of Raj (née Gupta) and Amar Jindal, from Punjab, India. His father is a civil engineer and graduate of Guru Nanak Dev University and Panjab University. His mother is a graduate of Rajasthan University and worked in nuclear physics at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh. Both worked as lecturers at an engineering college. Jindal's paternal grandfather was a merchant from Khanpur, Samrala and his maternal grandfather was a Ferozepur banker.
In January 1971, the family left Malerkotla, Punjab for Baton Rouge. They settled near Louisiana State University, where his mother was to begin graduate studies in nuclear physics.
Jindal attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School, where he competed in math tournaments as a member of Mu Alpha Theta. Outside of high school, he played tennis at the local community center; started various enterprises such as a computer newsletter, retail candy business, and a mail-order software company; and worked in the concession stands at LSU football games. He graduated in 1988.
Jindal then enrolled in Brown University where he was admitted to the Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME), an eight-year combined baccalaureate-M.D. medical program. While at Brown, he led the College Republicans student group and was named a USA Today Academic All-Star. After graduating in 1992 with dual honors in biology and public policy, he chose not to continue the program. He applied to and was accepted by both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but instead attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1994, he received an MLitt in political science with an emphasis in health policy. The subject of his thesis was "A needs-based approach to health care".
After completing his studies at Oxford, Jindal turned down an offer to study for a D.Phil. in politics, instead joining the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He then interned in the office of Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, where McCrery assigned him to work on healthcare policy; Jindal spent two weeks studying Medicare to compile an extensive report on possible solutions to Medicare's financial problems, which he presented to McCrery.
Early political career (1996–2003)
In 1993, McCrery introduced Jindal to Governor Mike Foster. In 1996, Foster appointed Jindal as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency that represented about 40 percent of the state budget and employed over 12,000 people. Foster called Jindal a genius who had a great deal of medical knowledge. Jindal was 24 at the time.
During his tenure, Louisiana's Medicaid program went from bankruptcy with a $400 million deficit into three years of surpluses totaling $220 million.
Jindal was criticized during the 2007 campaign by the Louisiana AFL–CIO for closing some local clinics to reach that surplus. Under Jindal's term, Louisiana nationally rose to third place in child healthcare screenings, with child immunizations rising, and introduced new and expanded services for the elderly and the disabled.
In 1998, Jindal was appointed executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, a 17-member panel charged with devising plans to reform Medicare. In 1999, at the request of the Louisiana governor's office and the Louisiana State Legislature, Jindal examined how Louisiana might use its $4.4 billion share of the tobacco settlement.
In 1998, Jindal received the Samuel S. Beard Award for greatest public service by an individual 35 years old or under, an award given annually by Jefferson Awards.
At 28 years of age in 1999, Jindal was appointed to become the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System, the nation's 16th largest system of higher education with over 80,000 students.
In March 2001, he was nominated by President George W. Bush to be Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation. He was later unanimously confirmed by a vote of the United States Senate and began serving on July 9, 2001. In that position, he served as the principal policy adviser to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He resigned from that post on February 21, 2003, to return to Louisiana and run for governor. He was assigned to help fight the nurse shortage by examining steps to improve nursing education.
Jindal came to national prominence during the 2003 election for governor of Louisiana. In what Louisianans call an "open primary" (but which is technically a nonpartisan blanket primary), Jindal finished first with 33 percent of the vote. He received endorsements from the largest paper in Louisiana, the Times-Picayune; the newly elected Democratic mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin; and the outgoing Republican governor, Mike Foster.