Meet Kshama Sawant, Councilwoman behind Seattle caste law: Grew up in Mumbai, took on Jeff Bezos

“Caste discrimination”, Sawant, who grew up in India, said, “is faced by South Asian American and other immigrant working people in their workplaces, including in the tech sector, in Seattle and in cities around the country”.

Sawant is not a career politician.

So says her bio on the Seattle City Council website. She identifies as “an activist who brings a passion for social justice to her work as a public servant”, and is committed to being a voice for “workers, youth, the oppressed and the voiceless”. According to her bio, Sawant only accepts the average workers’ wage and donates the rest of her six-figure salary (more than $100,000) to building social justice movements.

Sawant is a socialist by ideological persuasion.

Sawant, who the bio says “was always conscious of the extreme poverty and inequality surrounding her” while growing up in India, is a member of Socialist Alternative, “in solidarity with the Committee for a Workers’ International, which organises for working-class interests on every continent”.

She has served on the Seattle City Council since 2014 and is the first and only member of Socialist Alternative to have been elected to public office. Socialist Alternative describes itself as “a Marxist organization that fights for every reform possible but recognizes that capitalism by its very nature must produce inequality, racism, and sexism”.

On its website, Socialist Alternative lists its goals as mass unionization, a new political party for working people, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, free high-quality healthcare for all, and fully funded public education.

Childhood impressions shaped her personality.

Sawant, who was born in Pune in 1973, grew up, studied, and worked in Mumbai until 1996, according to various media profiles of the Councilwoman.

Her mother was a teacher of history and geography who retired as a school principal, and her father, a civil engineer, “was killed by a drunk driver when she was 13”, said a profile of Sawant published in The Los Angeles Times after she made history by winning her Seattle City Council seat in November 2013.

A profile of Sawant published by Al Jazeera in 2013 said “she grew up observing the consequences of the caste system and abject poverty — though she was part of a middle-class family from the Brahman caste”. She told Al Jazeera that “such exposure shaped her views and eventual conversion to socialism”.

In an interview with The Seattle Times in 2013, Sawant said: “Coming from India, what was striking is that you expect that in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity, there shouldn’t be any poverty; there shouldn’t be any homelessness… But when I came here (the US), I found it was exactly the opposite.”

She is a computer engineer and an economist.

Sawant studied computer science and graduated from the University of Mumbai in 1994. After working as a software engineer for a year and a half, she accompanied her then-husband, Vivek Sawant, an engineer with Microsoft, to the US. She studied economics, obtained a PhD from the North Carolina State University in 2003, moved to Seattle in 2006, and joined Socialist Alternative that same year. According to her City Council bio, she began teaching at Seattle Central Community College, Seattle University, and the University of Washington Tacoma.

In 2012, she ran as a Socialist Alternative candidate for Washington State Legislature and won 29 per cent of the vote. “We ran against the Democratic House Speaker Frank Chopp. With two p’s. We got 29 per cent of the vote; that represents over 20,000 people who voted for us,” Sawant told The Los Angeles Times in the 2013 interview.

She was active in the Occupy Movement.

As the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement of September-November 2011 spread from Zuccotti Park in New York City to cities all over the US, Sawant became one of the main organisers of the protests in Seattle. The Occupy protesters were able to temporarily push police out of a protest zone in West Lake Park.

Sawant spoke enthusiastically to The Los Angeles Times “about a demonstration called the Night of 500 Tents when she camped along with hundreds of other activists in Westlake Park, only to have her camping gear confiscated during a police sweep”. She told the paper that the protest was “a roaring success”.

Her City Council bio says she carried the Occupy momentum to her campaign for the council, “where she boldly ran on a platform of fighting for a $15/hr minimum wage, rent control and taxing the super-rich to fund mass transit and education”, and ultimately defeated a 16-year incumbent Democrat “to become the first socialist elected in a major US city in decades”.

She went head-to-head with Jeff Bezos and won.

Sawant’s campaign for re-election in 2019 pitted her against Amazon, the biggest private employer in Seattle, which pumped an enormous $1.5 million into the election through a business interest group that spent almost half a million dollars to back Sawant’s opponent.

After voters delivered a rebuke to the big corporates, Sawant “declared victory from a podium in front of a bright orange banner with the words “TAX Amazon” in giant print”, The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, reported. “The election results are a repudiation of the billionaire class, corporate real estate, and the establishment,” Sawant said at a press conference, Reuters reported.