1. Manka Dhingra was born on 1973 or 1974 and is an Indian-born American attorney and politician who is a Washington State senator.
17 Facts About Manka Dhingra
1. 2.
Manka Dhingra joined the King County Prosecuting Attorney's office in 2000 and led the department's expanding mental health and veterans courts.
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Manka Dhingra faced criticism in 2023 and 2024 for the data she used to support her positions on police pursuits and for claiming she still worked at the Prosecutor's Office.
4.
Manka Dhingra was born in Bhopal, India to a Sikh family; her father worked for Union Carbide and her mother was a schoolteacher.
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Manka Dhingra graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, earning a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science in 1995, before moving with her husband Harjit Singh to Redmond, Washington.
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Manka Dhingra founded Chaya, a non-profit organization to combat domestic violence against South Asian women, in 1996.
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Manka Dhingra joined the King County Prosecuting Attorney's office in 2000 and served as a Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for King County; she was last in that role in 2021.
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Manka Dhingra identified herself as a nonpartisan prior to the 2016 presidential election.
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Manka Dhingra's election overturned the Republican coalition majority in the Washington State Senate, giving the Washington Democratic Party complete control over the state's government for the first time since 2012.
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Manka Dhingra was named as the deputy majority leader in the Senate and assigned as the chair of the Behavioral Health Subcommittee.
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Manka Dhingra retained the 45th district seat by being re-elected in 2018 and 2022.
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In 2023, Manka Dhingra was fined by Washington's Legislative Ethics Board.
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That same year, Manka Dhingra received media coverage of her stances on restoring Washington's reasonable suspicion standard for police pursuit, including refusing to hold a hearing for a relevant bill in a committee she chairs and promoting problematic data about pursuits.
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In 2024, Manka Dhingra was criticized for limiting public testimony during a hearing she oversaw about Initiative 2113.
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Manka Dhingra ran in the 2024 Washington Attorney General election to become Attorney General of Washington, as the position was being vacated by Bob Ferguson, who successfully ran for Washington State Governor.
16.
In 2025, Manka Dhingra introduced a bill to repeal state code criminalizing concealed births.
17.
Manka Dhingra met her husband, Harjit Singh, while at the University of California, Berkeley.