Washington: Kshama Sawant (pictured), a Pune-born young Indian-American activist-academic, has become the first socialist to be elected to a public office in the US, with a narrow victory in the Seattle city council election over the 16-year Democratic incumbent.
Sawant, an economics professor who studied software engineering in Mumbai and economics in the US, was declared elected after her opponent Richard Conlin conceded.
Conlin was backed by the city’s political establishment, but Sawant’s campaign for taxing the wealthy to fund city needs and a $15 minimum wage resonated with the 400,000 electorate in Seattle, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of US in Washington state.
On the November 5 election night, Sawant was trailing by four percentage points, but ballots counted after election day turned the tide in her favour.
At a victory rally on Sunday, Sawant called her win a “political earthquake” according to SeattlePi, a local news site.
“We’ve shown that it’s possible to succeed in a grassroots campaign with an openly socialist campaign not taking money from big business,” she said.
Sawant held part-time teaching positions at Seattle Central Community College and Seattle University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Washington and Lee University.
She earlier ran unsuccessfully for the Washington State House of Representatives.
Born to Vasundhara and H T Ramanujam in Pune in 1973 in a middle-class family, Sawant grew up in Mumbai, where she studied computer science and graduated with a BSc from the University of Mumbai in 1994.
Following her marriage to Vivek, an engineer at Microsoft, Sawant moved to the US.
She then decided to abandon the computer engineering field.
Her PhD dissertation at North Carolina State University was titled “Elderly Labour Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy”.
Sawant moved to Seattle in 2006 and became a US citizen in 2010. She and her husband are now separated.
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