Indian-American bids for US city's first South Asian mayor

An Indian-American engineer is making a bid to become the first South Asian mayor of a US city that has 35 per cent Asian population in the state of Texas.
Harish Jajoo is running for the mayor post of Sugar Land City where he has been living since 1985 after migrating to the US from Canada.
Jajoo, one of two Indian-Americans on the six-person City Council, will face colleague Joe Zimmerman, also an engineer, in the next year's election to replace mayor James Thompson.
"I look different, I talk different, maybe I eat different. But my values for the city are no less than the next person," Jajoo, who came to the US from New Delhi when he was 20, was quoted as saying by the houstonchronicle.Com .

Eventually a South Asian will be mayor of the city, he said, adding that he was "not looking for that label".
Founded as a sugar plantation in the mid 1800s and incorporated in 1959, Sugar Land is located in Fort Bend county, some 30 kilometres southwest of Houston.

The county's Asian population has grown more quickly than any other group, according to a 2013 report by Stephen Klineberg, sociology professor at Rice University and his colleague Jie Wu.
"We don't get hung up on what our backgrounds are. We get hung up on the qualifications," Zimmerman said.
"We're not politicians per se. We're very much business people. We come from very diverse backgrounds and we all bring that perspective to building the city," Zimmerman said.

Both candidates name safety, infrastructure and economic development as major issues in the community.