Kshama Sawant Blames Modi Government for Allegedly Denying Her Indian Visa to Visit Ailing Mother
- The former Seattle City Council member says her criticism of the Citizenship Amendment Act and her introduction of a resolution condemning the law may have led to the denial.
Former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant is blaming the Modi government for denying her an Indian visa to to visit her ailing mother in Bangalore. An outspoken critic of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), she called the denial is a case of “political retaliation” by the government. Sawant believes that her criticism of the CAA and her introduction of a resolution in the Seattle council condemning the law may have led to the visa denial.
In a post on X, Sawant, Seattle’s most famous, outspoken and controversial politician. said she and her applied for an emergency visa and submitted both their passports at the Indian Consulate in Seattle. “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,” she wrote.
But Sawant knows she’s not alone. “Modi has retaliated against other activists & journalists, denying or revoking entry into India,” she wrote in a post on X. She mentioned that her “socialist Seattle City Council office took an unwavering stand against India’s right-wing, anti-worker, anti-Muslim PM Narendra Modi & his right-wing nationalist BJP party, and that the “working people” and her office “passed the first U.S. resolution condemning CAA-NRC.” At the time, “we faced opposition not only from the U.S. Democratic Party but also from Modi’s Indian consulate in San Francisco itself, which publicly opposed us,” she wrote. “We also won a resolution in solidarity with the farmers’ movement in India against Modi’s brutal and exploitative policies,” she added. “We won a historic citywide ban on caste-based discrimination, the first of its kind outside South Asia, despite opposition by Seattle Democrats, and right-wing, pro-Modi groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Hindu American Foundation,” she continued.
A veteran of the Occupy movement the 51-year-old was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013. Jacobin magazine says that “three years before Bernie Sanders entered the national stage with his 2016 bid for the Democratic primary, Sawant brought socialism back to the American vocabulary by becoming the first open socialist in nearly a century to win a citywide election in Seattle.”
Sawant served three terms as a Seattle City Council member. During her decade there, she made headlines for her progressive policies and her unapologetic left-leaning agenda. At She has previously said that she’s won election after election “not on the basis of go-along-to-get-along politics, not on the basis of wine and cheese with the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the establishment, but by fighting back and becoming a thorn in the side of the Seattle ruling class,” as reported by The Seattle Times.
The Mumbai-born and raised Sawant worked as a software engineer there, before migrating to the U.S., where she was “radicalized by the inequality and poverty” that she saw. After earning her Ph.D., Sawant moved to Seattle and began teaching at Seattle Central Community College, Seattle University, and the University of Washington Tacoma. She joined Socialist Alternative in 2006, and since then has helped organize demonstrations for marriage equality, participated in the movement to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was a visible presence in the Occupy Movement. She has also been an activist in her union, the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, fighting against budget cuts and tuition hikes.
In 2012, she ran as a Socialist Alternative candidate for Washington State Legislature where she won 29 percent of the vote. During her run for the Seattle City Council, she 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. Sawant was first elected to the council in 2013, defeating long-time incumbent Richard Conlin by the narrowest of margins: 51 percent to 49 percent. She was re-elected in 2019 in a close contest against Egan Orion, organizer of Seattle PrideFest, which she won by 52 percent.