Meet Saikat Chakrabarti, the Bengali-American chief of staff of the feisty New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
And then I noticed something interesting within her Instagram posts. A video of a scruffy-looking young man, wearing a moss green t-shirt with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s face embossed on it. My Bengali Leftist sentiments were immediately jolted awake. In today’s world, who finds significance in Bose? Let alone find it through a sartorial statement in the United States. Meet Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff of Ocasio-Cortez. He is also Bengali-American.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Chakrabarti is a Harvard graduate. Like millions of others, he spent years in Silicon Valley. Even co-founding a web design tool named Mockingbird and working on the product team of payment processor Stripe. In between, he walked the corridors of Wall Street for a while. But unlike many, he left all that behind to join the Bernie Sanders campaign. He later told the Rolling Stone magazine that even though he wasn’t “entirely sure he [Sanders] had all the right solutions,” he knew “he was talking about the right problems.”
While working on the Sanders campaign, Chakrabarti met Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent. Together they co-founded Justice Democrats, a political action committee whose one-line introduction says, “Our time – it’s time to usher in a new generation of diverse working class leaders into the Democratic Party. A Democratic Party that fights for its voters, not just corporate donors.”
Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, a similar committee also co-founded by Chakrabarti, worked together to recruit candidates by engaging with the masses. According to indiaabroad.com that quotes Beat DC, “party affiliation didn’t matter; candidates had to want health care for all, a living wage, and to want money to rule all in politics.” Out of the thousands of applications they received, Chakrabarti’s team supported 12 candidates for the Democratic Primaries. The success story of this campaign was the one of Ocasio-Cortez – the only one who was elected to the US Congress. Chakrabarti became her campaign manager and eventually her chief of staff.
The thirty-two year old Chakrabarti is perhaps a die-hard socialist and his pet project seems to be the Green New Deal, an eleven-page google document written by Ocasio-Cortez’s staff over one weekend with the goal to address both economic inequality and climate change. The New Yorker refers to it as the thing that, ‘in the past month has come to define the progressive cause in Washington.’
https://thebengalstory.com/english/meet-saikat-chakrabarti-the-bengali-american-chief-of-staff-of-the-feisty-new-york-congresswoman-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose info here:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Netaji-Subhas-Chandra-Bose-wanted-ruthless-dictatorship-in-India-for-20-years/articleshow/46980513.cms