Kshama Sawant (51), an Indian-American economist from Seattle and a former member of the Seattle City Council, has been claiming ‘vendetta politics’, claiming that her visa was denied three times by the Modi government. Notably, she has been actively involved in anti-India lobbying in the United States.
As a councilwoman, she drafted and piloted a law to designate “caste” a protected category under the city’s non-discrimination policy – the first such law passed by a city in the United States – which placed Hindus under additional legal scrutiny and faced fierce opposition from the community leaders and groups. Furthermore, she protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), aimed to grant citizenship to prosecuted minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
“India’s PM Modi & the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government are denying me a visa to see my ill mother. I’m not alone. Modi has retaliated against other activists & journalists, denying or revoking entry into India,” she wrote on social media while accusing the prime minister and his party of being “anti-worker and anti-Muslim.” She even launched a petition to “urge Modi to stop this retaliation.” She alleged that her repeated attempts to visit her 82-year-old mother who lives in Bengaluru have failed.
India's PM Modi & the BJP government are denying me a visa to see my ill mother.
— Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) February 1, 2025
I’m not alone. Modi has retaliated against other activists & journalists, denying or revoking entry into India.
Sign the petition. Urge Modi to stop this retaliation. https://t.co/pnLOLW5IHb
My…
Sawant also alleged that the Indian Consulate in Seattle ‘confiscated’ her and her spouse’s passports as part of the emergency visa application and added, “So there is also no indication whatsoever of if and when they will return our U.S. passports, which they’ve had for over three weeks.”
As part of the emergency visa application, the Indian Consulate in Seattle took my husband's and my U.S. passports.
— Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) February 1, 2025
So there is also no indication whatsoever of if and when they will return our U.S. passports, which they've had for over three weeks.https://t.co/oSVApj0vgR
As expected, her ideological peers, including Arfa Khanum Sherwani, soon joined the victimhood bandwagon and began attacking the Indian government while maligning the country.
Who is Kshama Sawant
Kshama Sawant was born to HT and Vasundhara Ramanujam in Pune and was primarily raise in Mumbai. Her mother is a retired principal and her father, a civil engineer, was killed by a drunk driver when she was 13 years old. She received her computer science bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai in 1994. Following a year-and-a-half as a programmer, she chose to focus on economics after relocating to the United States with her husband, Vivek Sawant, a Microsoft software engineer. She graduated with a doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University, in 2003.
After moving to Seattle, Sawant worked as an adjunct lecturer at Seattle Central College and as a professor at Seattle University and the University of Washington Tacoma. Additionally, she taught at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, as a visiting assistant professor. She joined Socialist Alternative in 2006. She was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013 after making an unsuccessful 2012 run for the Washington House of Representatives. She was the first socialist to win a Seattle citywide election since the 1916 election of Anna Louise Strong to the school board.
Sawant barely made it through a recall election for her council seat on 7th December 2021. She declared in January 2023 that she would support Workers Strike Back, a Socialist Alternative movement aimed at organizing workers, rather than run for reelection and next year announced that she had founded her own party, Revolutionary Workers, after leaving Socialist Alternative. She married Calvin Priest, a Seattle Socialist Alternative organizer, in 2016. She is also an active member of the American Federation of Teachers union.
Kshama Sawant’s anti-India past
The recent development seemed to have stemmed from Sawant’s long history of divisive political agenda against India. She was the driving force behind a resolution passed by the Seattle City Council in February 2020 denouncing India’s CAA and NRC for “discriminating against women, Muslims, members of suppressed castes, indigenous and LGBT individuals.”
Apparently, nobody in the Seattle city council noticed that Kshama’s resolution was blatantly lying about the CAA. The CAA had nothing to do with any existing Indian citizens, Muslim, LGBT, women or otherwise. It was a provision to grant citizenship to persecuted minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who have already been living in India as refugees.
The resolution asked the Indian Parliament to ratify several United Nations (UN) refugee relief treaties, repeal the CAA and halt the NRC. It should come as no surprise that anti-Hindu, anti-Indian, and Islamist groups praised the action.The Indian American Muslim Council‘s (IAMC) president, Ahsan Khan stated that Seattle’s decision should send a message to those who are threatening religious freedom and plurality. Thenmozhi Soundararajan of advocacy group Equality Labs also voiced support, characterizing Seattle’s initiative as a component of a worldwide protest against the CAA.
Sawant made another attempt to deter the situation in India in 2020 through a resolution which called on workers, farmers, students, and other community members to participate in solidarity actions in support of the protesting farmers in New Delhi. The resolution in favor of the Indian farmers protest, which was proposed by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda and co-sponsored by Councilmember Sawant, was unanimously approved by the Seattle City Council.
Seattle became the first city in the US to formally designate “caste” as a protected group under its non-discrimination policy in February 2023 after Sawant sponsored another contentious resolution. Hindu organizations condemned the rule for inciting prejudice against South Asians by singling them out.
“Throughout our two decades of existence, HAF has maintained that caste discrimination is wrong, violating core Hindu principles of the divine oneness of all beings. At the same time, we maintain that the singling out of South Asians and the addition of ‘caste’ to the non-discrimination policy violates the policies it now amends. The City of Seattle has voted to treat South Asians so that no other ethnic or racial community is treated under the guise of non-discrimination. It has voted yes to discriminating against ethnic minorities, repeating the ugliness of nativists in the state nearly a century ago,” Hindu American Foundation (HAF) co-founder and Executive Director Suhag Shukla expressed in an official statement after Sawant introduced the controversial law.
Equality Labs released reports stating caste prejudice in the United States which also played a significant role in the same. However, the methodology of these surveys was later questioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which highlighted that the numbers did not accurately reflect the South Asian population in the United States as a whole.
Is it really vendetta
It is evident that Sawant’s resolution and claims are not exactly based on facts but rather on far Left’s rhetoric against India, that has been popular among some US Democrats. She asserted that her opposition to CAA-NRC might be the cause behind the alleged visa denial.
Interestingly, the resolutions she passed were in 2020-21 and she was granted a visa in 2022 so she could meet her sick mother in India. If her present allegations are true then she shouldn’t have been permitted to land in the country even then. However, it wasn’t the case and she visited India.
According to reports, Sawant’s application was turned down this time. Her visa was denied earlier on 29th May of last year, but her spouse was granted approval. The couple then submitted for an emergency entry visa at the Indian Consulate General in Seattle on 9th January for the third time.
On the other hand, Sawant’s emergency visa application has not yet been denied, according to a government source, who also conveyed that issuing visas is a sovereign responsibility that must be respected. However, Sawant and her ilk don’t seem to understand this fundamental reality as they are relentlessly making absurd accusations, crying political retaliation and what not.
