Mamdani is someone to be proud of, but his ideas haven't worked in India

Zohran Mamdani's faith, support for Gaza, and dislike of Modi and Netanyahu are reasons why many in India are unhappy to see his rise, rather than celebrate it as another 'Indian' conquest

Zohran Mamdani is going to be in the “talk”, not just in New York City or American politics, but also in India. Or, rather than saying that he will be in the headlines, we could use language more apt for the digital era and his demographic: He’s going to be a most searched name for some time. 

There’s enormous oomph to a 33-year-old, super-stylish and articulate Muslim of Indian origin, who is now a frontrunner to govern the most powerful, rich, Jewish, and cosmopolitan city in the world. In India, it has played into the Hindu-Muslim binary. In the minds of the Hindu Right, it is the conquest of another great global city by a Muslim from the subcontinent. Sadiq Khan of London being the other. 

His support for Gaza, strong anti-Trumpism (in the US President’s own borough), and endorsement by the Democratic Left make him a personality important enough for Donald Trump to write a long post on. 

He’s paid him “compliments’ like “a 100% Communist lunatic”, one who “looks terrible, his voice is grating” and so on. Of course, he also links his rise to his pet hate — the quartet of women politicians on the Democratic Left who he calls “the Squad”, led by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or AOC. 

The President’s choice of words is, of course, Trumpian. In the Trump world, “Communist” or “lunatic” might be common enough description for anybody he dislikes, used as casually as old Captain Haddock of Tintin comics dismissing somebody as a pestilential pachyderm or, simply, a vegetarian. To be abused by President Trump isn’t a liability in New York. 

Do I have a problem, or even an opinion on Mr Mamdani’s rise? The answers are: Problem, no; and opinion, it’s great to see Indians rise in Western democracies. We took pride in Rishi Sunak, on the Indian Right, Kash Patel, Jay Bhattacharya, and even Hindu American Tulsi Gabbard are celebrated, as is the star cast of “Indian” CEOs. Mr Mamdani will be a stellar addition. 

I know what I am saying is triggering a lot of our readers. I am triggered too, but not for the reasons as some of you might be.  His faith, his views, support for Gaza, his dislike of Narendra Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu are the reasons many in India are unwilling to celebrate it as another “Indian” conquest. For them, it is a conquest by the wrong guy (read, the wrong faith). This polarisation has played out among the diaspora in New York as well. I am not so affected by this. If anything, I might have the boasting rights that the new mayor of the world’s greatest city (if he wins) is someone whose mom I hosted twice on Walk The Talk, a story I will tell you in the postscript. 

So, what am I triggered by then? To understand this, let me take you through some highlights of his election promises. He will eliminate fares on buses (hello Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana — and the list keeps growing) freeze the rent on two million already subsidised housing units (remember your Rent Control Act?) and to build more than 200,000 homes over three years through Social Housing Development Agency (every Indian city has some version of this, DDA, MHADA, BDA, no?), provide universal child care for kids from six weeks to five years (anganwadis?) and, hold your breath, sarkari grocery stores with low prices. Remember our “fair price shops”, kendriya bhandars and cooperative supermarkets? 

All of these ideas are so familiar to two generations of Indians as the great failures of the socialist state. If you were also parked in the ration shop line by your mom, as I was when just 10, to hold her spot until she finished cooking lunch and came to buy almost anything we needed, you will know what I mean. 

From sugar (200 grams per head per week in 1967) to wheat and even cloth by the metre — everything for the working classes was to be found at state-run shops. Even if you did not have an experience like this, you’ve seen the state-built concrete working-class housing in our cities, which are concrete slum clusters by another name. In New Delhi, I call them slums built by the Delhi Destruction (oops, Development) Authority, and every city has its own version. Our free bus services are now collapsing along with the state government finances. All of the ideas that failed so spectacularly in the country of his origin, Mr Mamdani is now promising to replicate in a city that millions of Indians have made their new home, mostly as economic refugees. 

Mr Mamdani is too young to have picked these ideas from India, and it is unlikely his parents experienced too much of this.  However, this love of socialism in a country that gave the modern world its capitalist dream, and in the city that represents that breathless success is an interesting point. What’s even more interesting is the appeal this finds among New York’s young.

This is especially so in the big cities, nearly all run by Democrats. And Mr Mamdani, if anything, stands way to the Left of “the squad”. Socialism, ironically, oozes a magnetic appeal in a city that should be the brand ambassador of capitalist success. 

Or is it the case that such success ultimately breeds socialism? That you become so rich, you can afford socialism? Europe swerved hard Left after the riches piled up, and has been course-correcting lately. Because socialism in rich societies also brings in immigration, racial and religious diversity and, truth be told, tribal internal conflicts from distant lands. Inevitably, it draws a reaction, and the Right returns. Even in Scandinavia, the home of the best socialism. 

India’s problem is that the bad ideas never left us. Only the good people, the best minds left. Millions of our brightest, most ambitious, entrepreneurial citizens made America their home. What were they fleeing if not our fake socialism? Every Indian who risks their lives on a “dunki” today is fleeing socialism that survives even in the Modi era. Check out how much the Modi government spends on distributive welfare and how the BJP, supposedly a Right-wing party, has embraced the freebie culture of Indian socialists. 

In January 1990, while covering the unravelling of the Soviet Bloc, I picked up some taxi driver’s wisdom in Prague. Except that this taxi driver had a master’s in engineering and was waiting for Václav Havel to fully liberate the economy. You Indians fought back for your political freedoms in the  Emergency, he said, but how come you never fought for your economic freedoms? 

He had the answer: Because you had never experienced economic freedom. You didn’t even know what you were denied. This was a conversation at Prague’s Wenceslas Square, where a sparkling streamer hung from a building saying, “Welcome back home, Mr Bata.” He was driven out by Communism, the driver said, built a fortune in Canada, and now all you Indians wear his shoes.

 

PostScript: Mira Nair and I set up our first WalkTheTalk interview one chilly January morning in 2005 at Delhi’s Jama Masjid. We had just about started when the Shahi Imam arrived, furious. “Ek dum rukiye aap” (stop at once), he said. He recognised me and softened. “Aap ke liye izzat hai, aap jab marzi record keejiye. Inke liye nahin” (We respect your. You can record whenever you like. But not with her). Why, I asked, and explained to him what a brilliant and globally respected woman she was. He wasn’t impressed and used adjectives that I’d rather not repeat. I wouldn’t even commit the sin of imagining if maulana sahib had seen Ms Nair’s Kama Sutra or heard of it. 

But we retreated, recorded in the street outside, and concluded the conversation over a breakfast of naan and nihari. 

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