Why Did India Miss the Zohran Mamdani Story?

The Indian media has woken up late to the news of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old who has now won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. To be fair, Mamdani was not a frontrunner for the race, but he has been in second place for a while with one poll, just before elections, giving him an edge. Nobody expected his comprehensive victory, probably not Mamdani himself. Nonetheless there were enough reasons to cover the story. Mamdani was in the race to become the first American of Indian origin for the post, and New York City is huge. Its population of nearly 8.5 million is larger than that of all but 12 of the states in the US, and its operating budget is over US $ 110 billion, approximately ten times that of the state of Delhi.

More to the point, Mamdani ran his campaign with an enormous outreach to South Asians, with ads in Urdu/Hindi using Bollywood themes. And if anybody had forgotten, he is also the son of the famed filmmaker Mira Nair as well as of the respected Ugandan academic of Indian origin Mahmood Mamdani. Whether for serious reasons – a person of Indian origin managing one of the most important financial and creative cities in the world – or for simple entertainment reasons, Mamdani was a story that should have written itself for the Indian media.

And yet, go further back than a day or two and all you find is a deathly silence. 

It is worth asking why.

The short, depressing answer is that Mamdani is Muslim – he identifies as a Shia of Twelver belief if anybody is interested, even if it is nobody’s business but his. As India has embraced Hindutva over the last dozen years it has celebrated those of Indian origin like Priti Patel or the eminently forgettable and quickly forgotten Rishi Sunak whose connections are more attenuated than those of Mamdani, and who you will struggle to find campaigning in any South Asian idiom whatsoever. For Muslims, Sikhs, and others, the government has little time, either ignoring them or painting them as separatists. Given that the majority of our media feels the necessity to crawl before power, we see the world through an increasingly narrow lens. 

But there is more to it than just that. If an Akhand Bharat – a larger South Asia where borders do not stand between people – exists, then it exists abroad. As anybody who has lived overseas can tell you, desis find it easy to be desis out of the subcontinent, to meet over food, music, and movies.

Divisions still remain, of course, and I confess to being annoyed with some of my Pakistani-American cousins and there was that memorable iftar in upstate New York where I was one of two people who identified as Indian while the rest were very Kashmiri. Language, politics, and food can be barriers as well as meeting grounds, but despite that, South Asians abroad have largely preferred to find grounds to meet and mingle rather than stand apart. A large part of that was the wider experience created by filmmakers and academics like Zohran Mamdani’s parents. It has been one of the reasons that he has been so successful at reaching across ethnicities and was able to address, with affection and a sense of ownership, the “Bangladeshi auntie” who campaigned for him near the end of his victory speech. 

That capacious sense of self has evaporated over the time that Modi has presided as India’s prime minister. He may have invited all South Asian heads of state for his first inauguration, but the goodwill and standing that India had across much of South Asia has gone. In 2014 India was one of the largest donors to Afghanistan’s government, today it is sidling up to the Taliban. At that time, India was one of the key partners helping in the restoration of democracy in Myanmar, today it is fencing its borders because of the violence in Manipur and its only interlocutor in Myanmar is the military junta. In 2014, India’s position in Bangladesh was as of the pre-eminent foreign supporter even as it engaged with the growing influence of China. Today it is pushing people across the border in violation of any basic rule of law or humanitarian principles. In 2014, Nawaz Sharif fought with the military leadership to attend an Indian prime minister’s inauguration. Today, even our airspace is closed to each other.

Many of these changes are ones in which India could do little, but not all. Furthermore, as Indian foreign policy has become more transactional, as it has touted its own power as a very large economy cumulatively (ignoring that at per capita levels, its people are hardly better off, and in some case worse off, than its neighbours’) it has looked to the US, Europe, and the world. The cost has been borne by the management of its relations in the neighbourhood.

When India passed its powerful Right to Information Act in 2005, countries lined up to learn from our experience. India exported its experience with police reform to other Commonwealth countries. Today, there is hardly any form of legislation in India that inspires South Asia and the world. If anything, we are cited as a caution of what could go wrong. It is incredibly ironic that the political party that bangs on about Akhand Bharat, putting up maps that strain our ties with our neighbours, has presided over the greatest withering of Indian appeal across the subcontinent. 

This has an impact on the desi diaspora as well. While the India Impact Fund, an organisation promoting the participation of Indian and South Asian Americans in politics backed Zohran Mamdani, a group titled Indian Americans for Cuomo and the American Hindu Coalition attacked him. This seems to be principally because Mamdani has criticised Modi in a similar vein as he has criticised the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mamdani’s comprehensive victory, in which South Asians have had a strong contribution, will likely have limited influence from anybody who approves of the current Indian government. As we increasingly find ourselves alone in our own neighbourhood our policies are also isolating us in the South Asia abroad as an increasingly diminished India chooses to march alone.

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award. 

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