Ashok Gadkar came to the U.S. as part of a wave of immigration from India and his hard work and marketable skills as an engineer enabled him to succeed in his new homeland. He and his wife, Sheela, raised their two children, son, Samit, and daughter, Sujata, who was born on the Fourth of July, with a strong sense of community values.
“That drives my focus on education,” said Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, of Trumbull, now 45. “My dad grew up very poor, but he was educated. The only loan he could get to relocate was a maximum of seven dollars.”
Gadkar-Wilcox recently emerged victorious in a four-way-race in the Democratic Party Primary for the right to run for Connecticut’s 22nd Senatorial District seat following the retirement of longtime legislator Marilyn Moore.
Gadkar-Wilcox is running against Chris Carrena, 31, a Republican candidate with a real estate background, who also lives in Trumbull. The 22nd District represents their hometown, Monroe and Bridgeport.
Gadkar-Wilcox is an attorney and a college professor. “I love what I do,” she said. “I teach human rights and constitutional law at Quinnipiac University.”
Gadkar-Wilcox, a married mother of two, grew up in Queens and has lived in Trumbull for the past 20 years.
“I’m an urban-suburban person,” she said during a recent interview. “I understand the urban-suburban dynamic. I understand how to advocate for the needs of both an urban and suburban district.”
Gadkar-Wilcox is already involved in all three communities in the district. She serves on the board for the Lakewood-Trumbull YMCA in Monroe, is a member of the Trumbull Rotary Club, and of the Greater Bridgeport League of Women Voters.
“I love this district. I’ve been working in all three communities,” she said. “I’ve been at the doors of Monroe, Trumbull and Bridgeport. It’s important for me to make that connection — to be the people’s candidate. I always believed you should be the public’s choice.”
Gadkar-Wilcox’s husband, Wynn, is from California. She met him at Cornell University in 1999, when he was a graduate student majoring in history and she was a government major. The couple married in 2005 and has two daughters, Ishika Ruth, 11, and Aksita Labelle, 8.
Gadkar-Wilcox went on to study law at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on child and homeless advocacy.
“I graduated from law school and started at Dechert to pay off my student loans,” she said. “I was a litigation associate, but my heart was always in public interest law.”
She later worked as a litigation associate at Wiggin and Dana in New Haven, before coming to Quinnipiac in 2011 to teach students with a focus on the U.S. Constitution, human rights and comparative Constitutional law.
Gadkar-Wilcox serves on the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights & Opportunities, and had also served as director of a nonprofit juvenile delinquency program in Westchester County.
“I was working with elementary school and high school students in the community,” she said.
The program involved building relationships between youths and police officers, while helping juveniles understand their rights under the law, according to Gadkar-Wilcox.
“I’ve always been about building relationships,” she said. “That’s where you get the violence and delinquency reduction.”
“I have a commitment to grassroots politics,” Gadkar-Wilcox said. “I believe in being involved and creating opportunities for students who don’t have them.”
Gadkar-Wilcox said she is proud of her involvement with the effort to send students, who otherwise would not have the opportunity, to the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights in England.
She recently attended an event at the Bijoux Theater in Bridgeport, and took part in the announcement that a university student from Bridgeport will join a Connecticut group of students going to Oxford.
A vision for the district
This is not Gadkar-Wilcox’s first election. She challenged Republican, David Rutigliano, for 123rd District seat in Connecticut’s House in 2018, losing 5,915 to 5,062. She ran again in 2020 and closed the gap, this time losing by only 234 votes.
Gadkar-Wilcox said redistricting made the district more conservative before she lost by a greater margin in 2022.
When she ran in the Democratic Party Primary for the 22nd Senatorial District this past summer, she won handily, taking 41 percent of the vote among the four candidates. Former Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, who once held the senate seat, was a distant second, garnering 27.8 percent of the vote.
“Itʼs time for leaders we can trust,” Gadkar-Wilcox said. “I stand for fair, secure elections and measures against absentee ballot fraud. I support public funding for elections and independent commissions to make our government truly representative.”
If elected this November, Gadkar-Wilcox said education will be a top priority, especially with American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding soon coming to an end.
“For both Trumbull and Monroe, not just Bridgeport, the ECS formula doesn’t work,” she said of the way the state decides how much financial aid to give local school districts. “Other towns that know how to game the system, like Fairfield and Darien, are getting more.”
Gadkar-Wilcox said she favors investing more money in economic development to bring vibrancy to the district without overdeveloping, grants to build infrastructure, and the promotion of green transportation.
She expressed a belief that her background with the YMCA and the Trumbull Rotary Club will serve her well as a senator.
“Politics is about community service and getting people excited and involved,” Gadkar-Wilcox said. “Republicans, Unaffiliated voters … I’m willing to talk to everybody.”
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