Zohran Mamdani: A Politics Beyond Representation
Mamdani’s victory as the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor charts a new path forward for the South Asian diaspora.
“Zohran Mamdani! Zohran Mamdani!” a Bangladeshi uncle chanted emphatically on my phone screen as I rewatched one of the many viral campaign videos. The video was pure hype—a carousel of uncles and aunties chanting Mamdani’s name, explaining their support in accented English, interspersed with Bengali and bright smiles. A few minutes later, I saw a TikTok video on my X feed: a group of Bangladeshi men of varying ages marching down a street in Astoria with Mamdani in their midst. In true Bangladeshi fashion, they chanted, “Amar mayor, tomar mayor—Zohran Mamdani, Zohran Mamdani” (My mayor, your mayor - Zohran Mamdani, Zohran Mamdani). Until then, I could only have imagined such a scene unfolding in Dhaka, or perhaps elsewhere in the subcontinent. Watching it take place on the streets of New York City made me feel that I was home away from home.
Mamdani’s support among Bangladeshi Americans in NYC, who make up 44 percent of the total Bangladeshi population in the US, was not limited to selective media clips. When I canvassed for him in Astoria (granted, it’s his home turf), the majority of Bangladeshi Americans I spoke with supported him. The restaurant staff at Boishakhi, which specializes in Bangladeshi cuisine, eagerly struck up a conversation with me when they learned I was a Mamdani canvasser—just like people back home talk politics at tea stalls. (They LOVED how he slammed Cuomo in the second debate.) On June 24, Mamdani won Bangladeshi American enclaves—Astoria, Jackson Heights, Jamaica Hill, Westchester Square—in a landslide; in his victory speech, the first canvasser archetype he thanked was a Bangladeshi aunty.
Mamdani’s meteoric victory was propelled by a 50,000 strong volunteer base who knocked 1.5 million doors, record-breaking turnout among millennial voters, huge turnout from Gen Z across all races/ethnicities and reactivation among disengaged immigrant voters, as pollster Michael Lange writes in his analysis of the election. Countering the “Bernie Bro”/white millennial-Gen-Z support base narrative, Mamdani secured strong support from both East and South Asian, and Latinx working class communities, materializing the vanishing middle class politicians love to talk about. Mamdani won neighborhoods that Harris lost in 2024 thanks to his strong affordability messaging; unsurprisingly, Muslim voters who were turned off by the Democratic Party’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, turned up to vote for Mamdani given his identity and pro-Palestine stance and advocacy. This stunning victory has struck fear into the hearts of Zionists, Wall Street ghouls, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and the political establishment, judging by the unhinged screeds flooding both social and legacy media—a frenzy that continues even at the time of writing.
The expected elation from progressives, Muslim Americans, and the Left aside, it has been rather interesting to observe the relative disquiet from those who have long shaped the South Asian diaspora narrative in the U.S. Indian Americans have largely remained silent on Mamdani’s win—especially those who had waxed poetic about Kamala Harris’s election as Vice President back in 2016, the peak expression of a certain liberal politics of representation that we were long told was the best we could hope for, at least for now. Indian media, which once exalted Harris’s rise to the vice presidency and later her appointment as the de facto Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election, has remained notably quiet about Mamdani’s victory. The fact that a bona fide 33-year-old member of the South Asian diaspora could very well become mayor of the largest U.S. city—and a global hub—has generated nowhere near the kind of hype Harris received. An uproar over a pair of Prada sandals, instead, dominates the Indian social media sphere. What little positive coverage of Mamdani’s victory exists has focused, yet again, on cultural aspects - his rap video with Madhur Jaffrey, or his advice to his mother to not direct a Harry Potter movie and such.
As Himal magazine’s newsletter noted, it is perhaps due to Mamdani’s identity as a Muslim that the Indian media—largely aligned with the right-wing Hindu nationalist Modi government—has refused to give him the spotlight. Or it could be the fact that Mamdani has openly referred to Modi by the apt nickname “Butcher of Gujarat,” pointing to Modi’s role as Gujarat’s Chief Minister in 2002 and his administration’s complicity in the anti-Muslim pogroms. Or perhaps it is because in 2023, protesting Modi’s visit to the US, Mamdani read aloud a letter from Umar Khalid, who has been imprisoned since 2020 in India for protesting Trump’s visit.
While the homeland media has been largely silent, right-wing Indians on social media have predictably shown their colors—calling out Mamdani’s Muslim identity, bemoaning the supposed arrival of Sharia Law in the U.S., and slandering him as anti-semitic. Indian Americans—especially the upper-caste savarnas, from whom we’ve heard discourse after discourse on cultural signifiers (chai, yoga, spirituality, etc.) and who have given us the likes of Bobby Jindal, Kash Patel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kamala Harris—have not spoken up in support of Zohran Mamdani (Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna being the exceptions). On the contrary, the Indian Americans for Cuomo PAC funded a racist banner ad displayed by a plane flying over NYC attacking Mamdani. The right-wing turn among Indian Americans notwithstanding, it remains a puzzling question: why wouldn’t they, especially the liberals, embrace Mamdani as one of their own?
The answer lies in Mamdani’s campaign and his core politics—rooted in the working-class South Asian diaspora of NYC and fundamentally antithetical to establishment politics, which diaspora elites have long catered to in efforts to prove their value as political actors, ultimately resulting in shallow representation. One of Mamdani’s biggest achievements in his brief career as a legislator in New York State has been securing $450 million in debt relief for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance—a group with significant South Asian representation, led by Indian American Bhairavi Desai, a nationally renowned labor advocate herself. The NYTWA was instrumental in Mamdani’s campaign. Similarly, an early endorser of Mamdani was the social justice-oriented community organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM; along with CAAAV, the Asian grassroots community organization), which works with working-class South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans. DRUM mobilized its network to canvas for Mamdani because they believed in the material promises of his campaign—that he would make the city affordable for the working class.
Mamdani’s campaign message was laser-focused on affordability and did not center his identity. But in post-9/11 America, it is inevitable that any Muslim (practicing or not)—especially one with pro-Palestine views—will be subjected to racist scrutiny, not just from the Right but also from establishment liberals. Mamdani deftly handled attacks on his identity once Cuomo and his supporters tried to make it an issue; but it is also true that his identity as a Muslim helped him enormously with the diasporic working class. Mamdani’s campaign was far from being class-reductionist, however; it skillfully weaved in bread and butter issues with identity politics to appeal to the diasporic working class. For example, it leaned heavily into South Asian cultural signifiers in the multilingual videos produced in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu—using mango lassi and mishti (sweets) to explain ranked-choice voting, and employing ’90s-era South Asian wedding video montages and effects in his campaign materials. Mamdani appeared on local diaspora media—on Khalid Mohiuddin’s show, a name familiar only to the Bangladeshi diaspora, and on Geo TV, the biggest private media channel in Pakistan. He made a concerted effort to learn and speak native languages as much as he could, and to speak to the South Asian working-class diaspora as genuinely as possible—to convince them that he is one of them, that he is one of us.
And herein lies Mamdani’s biggest victory within the Left: he broke through the professional-managerial class (PMC) barrier while synthesizing a politics that ties together both class and identity. Born to a renowned academic father and a celebrity filmmaker mother, Mamdani could have easily belonged to the PMC and been typecast into the same liberal South Asian diaspora elite who vie for representation over organization. But his years in NYC politics—especially within the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, which first propelled him to the State Assembly in 2020 and now to the Democratic nomination for NYC Mayor—have made him a class traitor of the best kind. While the road to the general election remains rocky, and victory is far from guaranteed—especially given how many in the “vote-blue-no-matter-who” crowd are struggling to accept Mamdani’s win as their nominee (including racist attacks from senior Democrats!)—Mamdani and his campaign have charted a new path forward for the South Asian diaspora. He has shown us that we, too, are political actors—and that our organized power matters. We should no longer be satisfied with mere representation, but demand our roti and roses too.
Nafis Hasan (@cannafis_) is a Bangladeshi writer and organizer based in Philadelphia. He is the author of Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care and also sits on Jamhoor’s editorial committee.
