According to Shiva Ayyadurai, the Republican Party hasn’t supported him even after launching his campaign.
Indian American Shiva Ayyadurai, who is running for the US Senate from Massachusetts, announced on Saturday that he will run as an independent candidate.
Ayyadurai, who had been campaigning as a Republican for more than nine months, made the announcement during a campaign event at a hotel in Marlborough.
“The reality is, the Republicans in Massachusetts are irrelevant and they’re in collusion with the Democrats,” Ayyadurai was quoted as saying by Boston Magazine. “The way I look at the world is establishment versus change agents. The establishment is those people who want to keep things the way they are. Change agents are people like me.”
Last week, Ayyadurai had announced that he would make an announcement on November 11 that would “shake up the nature of the Senate race and send tremors around the political landscape of Massachusetts and the country.”
According to Ayyadurai, the Republican Party hasn’t supported him even after launching his campaign. He alleged that the local branch of the party is run by “racists,” and his opponents in the party are only looking to advance their careers.
“They need me, if anything, to make this race relevant because the three people that they have are frankly irrelevant. I gave the Republicans—it was frankly a gift I gave them. And I’m not gonna give it to them anymore. They don’t deserve me,” Ayyadurai told Boston Magazine.
Ayyadurai had been facing a primary challenge from three candidates: businessman and Republican donor John Kingston, state Representative Geoff Diehl, and long-time party operative Beth Lindstrom.
Ayyadurai is campaigning against establishment politicians and he proposes to end the existing centralized power structure and replace it with a decentralized system putting power in the hands of people.
He had earlier alleged that he had been facing opposition from the party establishment that did not have the ability to win the election.
Born in Mumbai, Ayyadurai came to the United States when he was 7. At the age of 13, he developed an electronic emulation of the interoffice mail system, named “EMAIL,” for which he holds a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Ayyadurai, who has four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is currently the Chairman and CEO of CytoSolve, Inc., which provides a platform for modeling complex diseases as well as for discovering multi-combination therapeutics.