Indians, as a rule, are diaspora proud. They heap lavish praise on expatriates, particularly those ethnic Indians who cover themselves with glory in their adopted country. They are regarded as role models and put on a pedestal.

But there is an exception: Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential election in America. He is currently the governor of Louisiana which is no mean achievement. But if the social media is any indication, the vast majority of Indians clearly hate Jindal and don’t want him to enter the White House come what may.

The hostility begs the question, what’s Jindal’s crime? He seems to have committed quite a few ‘sins.’ The 44-year-old has completely rejected his Indian roots, including Hindu religion he was born into and embraced Christianity. He also dropped his first name, Piyush, and took on an American name, Bobby. As if this isn’t enough to lit Hindu hardliners’ fuse, Jindal rebuffed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to meet him during his state visit to US last year.

Jindal is a non-conformist in the truest sense of the word. He is a free spirit. He has made choices he is perfectly entitled to. Jindal haters, in my opinion, are undemocratic, bigoted and intolerant of beliefs and opinion, particularly religious and political, different from theirs. I see nothing wrong in Jindal being a true blue American.

Jindal’s latest “sin” is bracketing India with Vietnam of all countries! Rubbing it in like never before, Jindal told Fox News that “non-aligned countries like India and Vietnam are hungry and desperate for American leadership.” It didn’t go down well at all in India which sees itself as an emerging superpower and not an American lackey. Jindal made the remarks in the context of dealing with China. He said that besides America’s steadfast allies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, he would rope in India and Vietnam to contain China as they are “desperate and hungry” for US leadership.

Indians accuse Jindal of being unabashedly anti-India, although his conservative but well-educated Punjabi parents arrived in America in 1971 from Khanpur. He was born within four months of their arrival and had a typical American childhood. Today he insists that he wants to be known simply as an American, not an Indian-American. And he advises immigrants to follow his example to fully assimilate by converting from Hinduism to Christianity, giving up their traditions and customs and acquiring an American name.

Jindal is so forthright that he recently said in public: “My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans — not Indian-Americans. If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India.” Period.

The Indian-American community. which happens to be mostly Democrat, is as aghast as Indians. They say that Jindal is pandering to the far right and would stoop to anything to become the president. Suresh C. Gupta, one of the community’s leading lights and a Democrat, told the Washington Post: “So what if he’s Republican? So what if he’s Christian? I don’t care about those things. But you can’t forget about your heritage. You can’t forget about your roots.”

The depth of anti-Jindal sentiments in the Indian-American community became evident during Modi’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Jindal, obviously, didn’t attend it. He bluntly told Modi that he had no time for him and refused to see him. But when Jindal’s name was mentioned at the rally, there were loud jeers revealing how intensely expatriates hated him for what he stood for.

According to Aseem Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation and professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, “Jindal is, to most Indian-Americans exactly what they do not want their children to become — a person orphaned from traditions, heritage and religion that nurtured him, who openly and publicly disavows his community. His embrace of a far-right evangelical ideology leaves him with nothing in common with most Indian Americans.” Even a balanced and liberal Indian like Shashi Tharoor says that while Jindal’s fairytale success story places him in the same league as Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, Hargobind Khorana and Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri, we “should not make the mistake of thinking that we should be proud of what Jindal stands for.”

At this rate, the only Indians celebrating Jindal’s entry into the White House, if it at all happens, will be his cousins in the Jindal family’s native Khanpur village in Punjab!