Kshama Sawant
| Kshama Sawant | |
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| Member of the Seattle City Council from District 3 |
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Assumed office January 1, 2016 |
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| Preceded by | Bruce Harrell |
| Member of the Seattle City Council, Position 2 |
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In office January 1, 2014 – January 1, 2016 |
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| Preceded by | Richard Conlin |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
October 17, 1973 Pune, India |
| Political party | Socialist Alternative |
| Alma mater | North Carolina State University (Ph.D.) University of Mumbai (B.Sc) |
Kshama Sawant (/ʃɑːmə sɑːˈwʌnt/; born October 17, 1973) is an American socialist politician, activist and member of Socialist Alternative who sits on the Seattle City Council. A former software engineer, Sawant became a socialist activist and part-time economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States. Sawant ran unsuccessfully for the Washington House of Representatives before winning her seat on the Seattle City Council. Sawant was the first socialist to win a citywide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916.
Sawant was born to Vasundhara and H. T. Ramanujam in Pune, in a Hindu middle-class family. Her mother is a retired principal and her father, a civil engineer, was killed by a drunk driver when Sawant was 13. Sawant's observations of poverty in her native country and her unhappiness with the Indian caste system helped shape her political views before her adoption of socialism. Sawant grew up in Mumbai where she later studied computer science and graduated with a B.Sc from the University of Mumbai in 1994. She married her husband Vivek, an engineer at Microsoft, and moved to the United States. They have since become estranged.
Shocked by the level of poverty she saw, Sawant decided to abandon the computer engineering field. She pursued studies in economics because of what she described as her own "questions of economic inequality." She entered the economics program at North Carolina State University where she earned a PhD. Her dissertation was titled Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy. Sawant moved to Seattle in 2006 and became a Socialist Alternative party member. She became a United States citizen in 2010.
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