From Kerala to Chicago Via Cambridge and Harvard: Indian American Rights Activist Readies to Run for Illinois State House

For the second time in two weeks, Litcy Kurisinkal, a candidate for the Illinois State House, was protesting against the reported inhumane conditions inside the Broadview ICE holding facility on the outskirts of her home city of Chicago, Illinois. 

“On our first visit, they tear-gassed us and shot us with rubber bullets,” said Kurisinkal, a 12-year resident of the lakefront Chicago district that she is running to represent in a diverse, grassroots campaign. If elected, she would be the first person of color to hold the District 12 seat. “The next time, ICE sent an armored vehicle and a horde of armed, flak-jacketed agents directly into our crowd of peaceful protesters.” 

Kurisinkal is no stranger to protest. She’s spent nearly her entire adult life as a champion for the rights of exploited children, women, and migrant laborers. But as a young, promising student growing up in a small seaside village in Kerala, she’d envisioned a very different future. 

The daughter of a merchant navy captain and a high school principal, she aspired to be an Indian Administrative Services officer. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Mahatma Gandhi University, and a master’s degree in the same field from the University of Delhi, she was awarded a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholarship in 1999, and moved to the U.K. to study higher mathematics. 

Within months, a personal tragedy would upend her life, and change the course of her career. Her father died unexpectedly, on the heels of three other recent deaths including her sister and niece, and Kurisinkal was devastated. After her time in Cambridge, she returned to Delhi, where a friend invited her to join a UN project to educate migrant workers about the dangers of HIV and AIDS.  It was a turning point in her life.

“She took me to the largest industrial area in Delhi, where I saw the real poverty of India firsthand. There are a large number of people who live like that, and I hadn’t been exposed to it. The kids I’d seen in documentaries were right there in front of me,” Kurisinkal said. “That motivated me to work in the field of human rights.”

“I’ve lived in West Africa, I’ve lived in India, and it’s been shocking to see how poorly basic needs are met here, when this country has the greatest riches and most powerful economy in the world.”

This was the beginning of a two-decade career in human rights with the U.N., International Labor Organization, Global March against Child Labor under Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi and other global organizations, in which Kurisinkal worked on projects ranging from rooting out child labor in the garment and sporting goods industries, to organizing India’s security workers for the first time in India, to developing crisis-mapping software concept to locate human trafficking hotspots around the world, to addressing coastal erosion in her native village in Kerala. 

In 2013, she earned a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her thesis focused on the plight of children living on the streets of Delhi and their access to protection, for which she was awarded the Best Human Rights Policy Prize by Harvard Kennedy School. As part of the research process, she shared.

“I still can’t sleep properly at night, the stories shared by those young children were so traumatic. So when I came back, I wanted to launch some projects to address it. What I realized is that people often find it overwhelming to even discuss these stories. Such issues remain good coffee table conversations, but very few people actually want to work on the ground. It was then I realized that if I needed to make transformational changes in the lives of people, I needed to become a policymaker or a politician with decision making capacity.” 

After graduating from Harvard, Kurisinkal moved to Chicago, and began working with the UN Special Rapporteur, Maud Buquichhio, against the sale and sexual exploitation of children. She also became active in her lakefront neighborhood of Lincoln Park, serving as the elected chair of a local school council, leading a Girl Scout troop, and organizing grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts for the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns with Women Forward. She traveled to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan as a part of GOTV efforts mobilizing voters.

“Through my work in the human rights field and political activism, I saw that political convenience often determines priorities instead of the needs of citizens,” she said. “And that was a driving factor in my decision to run for office. Ethical leadership should not be a myth.”

Kurisinkal said that she is further alarmed by what she sees as a rising totalitarianism in the United States, coupled with the unraveling of civilized public discourse, the weakening of the middle class, and the deliberate degradation of the social safety net. 

“I’ve lived in West Africa, I’ve lived in India, and it’s been shocking to see how poorly basic needs are met here, when this country has the greatest riches and most powerful economy in the world,” she said. “So I started reaching out to various organizations to understand what was going on, and I found that there’s a real social gap in education, in food access – these basic human rights. I realized that those issues must be at the center of our policy decision-making, and must be addressed if we are to retain our strength as a nation, and our influence as a leader on the world stage.”

When Rep. Margaret Croke announced that she would not be running for re-election in Illinois House District 12 this year, Kurisinkal saw an opportunity to bring her decades of political advocacy experience to bear in serving her Chicago community. 

The top issues she’s focusing on in her campaign are public safety with a preventive approach by addressing the root causes of crime, fully funding public education, fiscal innovations and ensuring that young professionals and seniors can continue to afford to live in the pricey lakefront district. 

“I have a strong track record of human rights advocacy, and am involved in the community at the grassroots level,” Kurisinkal said. “I walk my talk — to me, it is not just words. I have depth, and I care passionately about making our city the best that it can be for the people.”

And she will never stop calling for a return to traditional liberal democracy and first amendment rights in the face of the federal incursion into Chicago, she said. 

“The militarization of our state is an abomination against our democratic ideals. The federal government is trying to crush our democracy. But it is impossible to get away in a country where citizens are self-aware and empowered to fight back,” Kurisinkal said. “The Trump administration wants to suppress our rights to free speech and peaceful protest. However, I am an ardent optimist who believes in the power of people. When people stand together, no dictatorship can survive.”

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Marshall Reiffsteck is a former newspaper journalist, brand strategist, and corporate communications director who serves as an advisor to the Kurisinkal District 12 campaign. She lives in Chicago with her husband, two teenage children, and their Portuguese water dog. In her free time, she enjoys skiing in Utah, sailing Lake Michigan, coaching middle-school track, and hiking in the mountains of her native Virginia.