Keshama Sawant

Kshama Sawant (English: Kshama Sawant; October 17, 1973 -) is an Indian-American politician and economist in the United States. She served as a member of the Seattle City Council from 2014 to 2024. From 2008 to May 2024, she was a member of the Trotskyist party Socialist Alternative and is so far the only member of the party to be elected to public office. As of 2021, she is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sawant was born into a middle-class Tamil family in Pune, India, and grew up in Mumbai. Her mother was a principal and her father was a civil engineer who was killed by a drunk driver when she was 13 years old. In 1994, she graduated from Mumbai University with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Later, she moved to the United States with her husband, Microsoft software engineer Vivek Sawant. After working as a programmer for a year and a half, she decided to turn her attention to economics. In 2003, she received her PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University. The title of her graduation thesis is "Old Labor Supply in Rural Underdeveloped Economies." After moving to Seattle, she taught at Seattle University and the University of Washington at Tacoma, and was an adjunct professor at Seattle Central College and a visiting assistant professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. In 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for the Washington State House of Representatives and was successfully elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013. She was the first socialist to win a municipal election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the school board in 1916. In the city council recall election on December 7, 2021, she barely retained her position with a slim margin of 310 votes (0.76%). This was the first recall election held in Seattle since 1975. In January 2023, Sawant announced that she would not seek re-election and would instead work on the Socialist Alternative "Workers Fight Back" movement aimed at organizing unions.