The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Washington

The son of Punjabi immigrants won an election in Louisiana to become the first Indian-American US state governor, media reports said.

Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, 36, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, is also the first non-white to hold the post since the 1870s and the nation's youngest governor.

"My mom and dad came to this country in the pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened? They found the American dream to be a alive and well right here in Louisiana," Jindal told a cheering crowd, in a televised speech after his victory.

He won 53 percent of the vote with more than 90 percent of votes counted, said The Advocate newspaper in the state capital Baton Rouge. His nearest challenger had just 18 percent. The score meant Jindal avoided a runoff election and would be sworn in as governor in January.

In 2004, Jindal became the second Indian-American to be elected to the US Congress. Some analysts blamed racism for his narrow 2003 loss in the Louisiana governorship race to Kathleen Blanco, a white moderate Democrat.

Blanco did not contend the race following a backlash at her administration's response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster and there had been no other strong opponents on the field.

The newspaper cited analysts as saying that Jindal benefited from a low turnout of black voters in the southern state, who traditionally back Democrats, and that he probably had strong support from whites.

Jindal, who adopted his nickname from The Brady Bunch television show as a boy and converted to Roman Catholicism from Hinduism as a teenager, has moved rapidly up the political ladder.

A holder of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, he was appointed secretary of Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals at the age of 24.

After a brief stint in Washington, he returned home as the youngest president of the University of Louisiana System before being appointed a top policy advisor in the federal department of Health and Human Services.

He refused to admit that race was a factor in his failure to carry the state in 2003. But he worked on his image, donning cowboy boots and jeans and spending time in fundamentalist Christian churches.

Jindal was born and raised in Baton Rouge after his parents came to the United States so that his mother, pregnant with him at the time, could continue her graduate work in nuclear physics.

His father, an engineer, was one of nine children in a poor rural family in Punjab.