In 2025, Zohran Mamdani captured New York City’s mayoralty on a platform built around affordability, free public transit and a democratic-socialist vision of progress and inclusivity. His win demonstrated that redistributive politics can succeed when supported by sustained organising, institutional credibility and an electorate capable of transforming economic frustration into collective action. 

But one may ask why such developments elude Indian democracy?

Inequality without political traction

Given the depth of economic distress across much of India, one might expect such conditions to steer voter behaviour. Yet it rarely does. What tends to guide political choices are cash transfers from the government, the pull of identity politics, caste alignments and narrative frames around jungle raj, corruption or family-based parties and dynastic control. And when it comes to cash transfers, we cannot reasonably quibble with them in the context of prevailing economic insecurity. 

Their popularity is not a testament to the policy’s inherent merits so much as an indictment of the failure to ameliorate deprivation that defines life for millions of our citizens today. Lack of opportunities and jobs has made these transfers indispensable, but they cannot dislodge the deeper forces that continue to organise political life: identity.

A film that mirrors political reality

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, based on a script by Basharat Peer, captures this stark reality with striking effect. It is an unflinching exploration of economic inequality, religious discrimination and institutional injustice, yet what has gripped audiences is its arresting portrayal of a friendship that cuts across caste and community lines. 

The pandemic acts as a backdrop that magnifies the staggering levels of inequalities and the harsh realities faced by those with no safety net. This broader social landscape comes into sharp focus in the film’s opening sequence, a searing image of India, today: hundreds of young people crossing railway tracks to apply for the lowest levels of elusive sarkari naukri. 

Set in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the story follows two migrant labourers, Chandan, a Dalit Hindu, and Shoaib, a Muslim, who travel to Surat in search of work and forge a deepening bond despite the weight of separate identity. Yet, even as economic opportunity beckons, neither can easily step outside the identities that shape their everyday lives. The film lays bare a political truth: inequality matters, but caste, religion, and community often matter more in determining choices and life chances.

The paradox of deprivation and identity

In India, the kinds of inequality and deprivation depicted in Homebound seldom gain political traction, yet the identities of its two protagonists reliably do. Even in many of the nation’s poorest regions, electoral outcomes are shaped less by calls for equality than by the gravitational pull of identity politics. 

This reveals a central paradox: material deprivation does not translate into support for redistributive agendas even for parties that advocate it. Instead, voter behaviour emerges from a far more layered political terrain, one defined by transactional welfare, entrenched social hierarchies, narrative dominance, and the fragility of institutions.

Redistribution ultimately depends on a baseline of trust in the state’s capacity to deliver universal programmes. But Indian voters, shaped by decades of bureaucratic arbitrariness, uneven implementation and politicised access to public goods, are sceptical of expansive promises issued by the opposition. 

In a climate of economic uncertainty, people opt for small, reliable benefits from the party already in power, the very party that was willing to dispense largesse in violation of the Aachar Sanhita, rather than gamble on proposals from the other side. Redistributive agendas also fail to take off because parties and local organisations seldom articulate or mobilise around them.

The missing infrastructure of mobilisation

At the core of Mamdani’s victory was political mobilisation, not just in the heat of an election but in the long organising that preceded it. His campaign drew strength from organised constituencies capable of aggregating material grievances: tenant associations, unions, neighbourhood organisers, immigrant rights groups, public school advocates and public transport activists formed a dense, interlinked ecosystem of mobilisation. These groups gave redistributive politics both a durable social base and real communicative power. India today has no comparable architecture. 

Trade unions speak for a shrinking formal sector; agricultural mobilisation is episodic and regionally concentrated; and migrant labour remains largely invisible as a political category. None of these constituencies is empowered enough to act as political blocs, let alone as coordinated ones. In the absence of organisations that can translate economic hardship into political pressure, redistributive politics is left without a carrier and without a vehicle.

Identity narratives eclipse class narratives

Equally important is the texture of India’s political culture. Mamdani’s platform emerged in a society where inequality, housing, rents, transportation access and other structural determinants of economic precarity are accepted themes of public debate and contestation. In India, by contrast, the public sphere is currently dominated by national security, cultural majoritarianism, civilisational pride, religious identity and leader-centric oratory. 

Structural questions seldom receive continual attention from political parties, and only intermittently from social movements. Calls for redistribution remain marginal, crowded out by identity-based narratives that offer voters a more immediate sense of belonging, benefit and political hope.

These narratives leave little space for meaningful engagement with economic inequality or structural disadvantage. Even when parties or candidates try to foreground redistributive agendas, they struggle to gain traction amid the communal polarisation reinforced by political messaging and media ecosystems. In contemporary India’s narrative landscape, identity consistently eclipses redistribution, which depends on solidarities that bridge entrenched social divides, a far more demanding task in an already fractured society.

The structure of welfare itself reinforces this dynamic. Indian welfare remains largely transactional rather than rights-based; benefits are received as discretionary favours, not as entitlements anchored in citizenship. This produces gratitude instead of rights consciousness and encourages voters to view welfare as something owed back to the party that dispenses it.

Constraints on party politics

Political parties, including those in the opposition, find it difficult to move beyond this framework. The extent of economic hardship compels parties across the spectrum to support relief initiatives for the poor such as cash transfers. Consequently, cash-transfer schemes are rarely challenged on substantive grounds; criticism typically surfaces only on procedural issues, especially disbursements after the Model Code of Conduct has come into effect. 

During the Bihar election, for instance, opposition parties questioned the timing of transfers to women but left unaddressed the mass deprivation and palayan that make such transfers necessary. This broad consensus around cash transfers exist alongside a persistent reluctance to embrace universal, rights-based entitlements. Tellingly, the party that has perfected the cash-transfer-identity model is also the one most resistant to rights-based welfare.

These interlocking realities explain why identity politics so often outweighs redistributive politics in India. The dominance of identity does not signal indifference to redistribution; it reflects the absence of the political, institutional and narrative infrastructure that can sustain it.

In the event, voters act in ways that protect the few forms of security available to them in a system that offers very little to the impoverished. This is precisely why a framework of fundamental economic rights on par with civil and political rights is essential to guarantee every citizen a minimum standard of material well-being for a decent life by virtue of their citizenship.

A rights-based path forward

Universalising core entitlements – food, education, employment guarantees, pensions and healthcare and securing them as constitutional rights would transform people from passive beneficiaries into rights-holders, loosening the grip of transactional welfare. Rebuilding local organisations capable of aggregating economic grievances would give redistribution a durable social base. 

Until India develops the institutional, organisational and ideological structures required to translate economic hardship into coordinated political pressure, as Mamdani’s campaign did by foregrounding economic inequality through constant collective action, redistributive agendas will remain fragile, and identity will continue to dominate the political imagination. 

Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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