US Presidential race 2016: Sigh! we activate our Plan B since our politicians are unexportable

It’s not as if presidential hopeful person of Indian origin (PIO)yush Bobby Jindal is the first of his kind. Indeed, the Indian diaspora can count a healthy clutch of former and current presidential and prime ministerial PIOneers, particularly in nations such as Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Singapore. And there are many in those and other nations who did not make it to the top job — as many suspect will be the lot of BobbyJi as well — but nonetheless bulk up the ranks of diasporic political heavyweights. So, native Indians back home certainly should not look upon the avowedly non-hyphenated Governor of Louisiana as anything other than a, well, native American — without a capital ‘n’ of course — making a shy at the White House.

However, the (probably coincidental) simultaneous ascendance of PIOliticians as serious top-job contenders in three prominent nations — US, Britain and Ireland — deserves consideration. If by chance BobbyJi, Sajid Javid and Leo Varadkar do end up as President, Prime Minister and Taoiseach respectively — that too, concurrently — sometime in the future, it would mark an unparalleled feat by the diaspora of any country. Some might even think that adding them to the list of leaders of Indian origin in other countries would merit a ‘world record’-setting event status at the very least.