Agencies .
LOUISIANA, Oct 21: Bobby Jindal was elected as the new Louisiana governor. He is the first Indian American to be elected as the governor of a state.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, the Oxford educated son of Indian immigrants, was looking to win election outright in a primary vote to become Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since the 1870s.
Four years after he lost a heated battle for governor, the 36 year old Jindal was well ahead of the pack in a repeat run Saturday. He is also the youngest U.S. governor currently in office.
The Republican's prospects brightened thanks to three years of congressional experience, a splintered Democratic field and an incumbent whose political fortunes were done in by Hurricane Katrina.
Polls have shown Jindal has the support of nearly half the state's voters, and no one else is even close in the field of a dozen candidates.
Under Louisiana's open primary system, all candidates for governor are running against each other, regardless of party.
Jindal lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco in 2003, getting 48 percent of the vote. Blanco ended her re election bid earlier this year after being sharply criticized for the state's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The recovery effort will remain a central issue for her successor.
Just 32 during his first gubernatorial run, Jindal by then already had served as Louisiana's health care secretary, president of one of its university systems and an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President George W Bush. After losing to Blanco, he easily won a vacant congressional seat in 2004 and coasted to re election last year.
He talks of the need for ethics reform in a state marred by a longtime reputation for corruption, and he campaigns as a conservative who wants to rein in government spending and cut business taxes.
Jindal avoids any discussion about his ethnicity. At a Thursday night debate, Jindal sidestepped a question about whether he thought his Indian American background was an impediment in his political career.
But in Jindal's ancestral hometown in Maler Kotla in northern Punjab, his relatives prepared to celebrate ahead of Saturday's vote.
The last nonwhite governor of Louisiana was P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served for just over a month from Dec. 1872 to Jan. 1873. That was during the post Civil War Reconstruction Era, when many white voters were disenfranchised because of their support for the failed rebellion by secessionist southern states.