There’s something about Zohran K Mamdani

Who’s afraid of Zohran Kwame Mamdani? The 33-year-old Democrat candidate for New York mayor, whose many names are clearly more than a sum of its parts, has stirred and shaken half the globe in recent days — from Donald Trump (“he’s a Communist lunatic”) to Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi (“when he opens his mouth, Pakistani PR takes the day off”), to frothing right-wingers like Kangana Ranaut (“he’s ready to wipe out Hinduism”).

So what is it about this suited-booted young man that’s got the whirlwind in his sail? Let’s start with the names — the middle a reference to the Marxist Socialist first prime minister of Ghana; the last to his father, a Gujarati-Muslim scholar from Uganda, now a professor of international affairs and anthropology at Colombia University; the first to an Arabic word that means ‘a ray of light.’ As for his mother, she is the Hindu Punjabi documentary film-maker Mira Nair, who we all know has made both Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala. Zohran’s wife, meanwhile, is Syrian and works in animation.

The young man himself identifies as “democratic socialist”. He reached across New York City’s several divides — Black and South Asian, Hispanic and White and Chinese — to win 92 per cent of the Democratic vote to secure his seat as the party candidate earlier this week. He fought for basic issues like free bus fares, free child-care and controlled public housing rentals. He and his large band of volunteers invoked the old-fashioned principles of politics to go from house-to-house to ask for votes — a bit like what the RSS still does, what the Congress has forgotten to do, and what the Aam Aadmi Party once did back in the day.

Some of Zohran’s comments are, clearly, more hearsay than fact — and, yes, he should be far more careful, even if he’s 33. For example, he said last month that so many Muslims were killed in the 2002 riots in Gujarat that “people don’t even believe we exist anymore.” (In fact, there are 5.8 million Muslims in Gujarat.) He has likened PM Modi to Benjamin Netanyahu, who he described as a “war criminal.” (In 2022, the Supreme Court upheld the SIT’s clean chit and cleared the PM of any connection with the 2002 riots.)

Notwithstanding the blood-letting in states like Mizoram — when the Indian Air Force in 1966 strafed Mizos seeking to secede from India — and later in Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab and Chhattisgarh, the Indian state has largely stayed away from carrying out mass violence against its own people; even in Chhattisgarh, Congress rulers gave up the ‘Salwa Judum’ vigilante movement it had orchestrated in 2005 to contain Left-wing extremism, which meant that tribals were killing tribals, as a bad idea.

Manipur, in the last two years, remains a continuing exception.

And yet there’s something about Zohran. In 2023, as a member of the New York state Assembly, he read from the notes of jailed student Umar Khalid about “the stillness in Tihar jail” — where he remains jailed, under several sections of the UAPA, for his alleged role in the 2020 Delhi riots. It will be 1,749 days, today, of Khalid’s incarceration, nearly five years of living in a cell, but charges have still not been framed against the young man.

Perhaps some of Zohran’s incredible popularity is simply a reminder of what we once were — less cynical, braver, and determined to rearrange our societies so as to make them more egalitarian. He clearly likes to break down the walls, as Robert Frost once wrote, wondering what the functions of walls were — what were they walling in, or walling out. He likes to open the windows and let the air come in, as Gandhi once said was the function of windows.

In an interview with Vogue India in 2020, soon after he became a member of the NY Assembly, Zohran talked about the run-up to his campaign when he was advised to be “less desi.” Instead, he spoke of his own immigrant experience and called it “Roti and Roses.” There was a video called ‘Nani,’ a “woke granny,” featuring the star Madhur Jaffrey. As he walked across the city, he said, he listened to Meesha Shafi, Ali Sethi and Dr Zeus.

Perhaps the fact that he’s simply not embarrassed to be a bit of this and a bit of that, is what’s so charming about Zohran. He reminds us of the ceaseless ebb and flow that is the dharma of the Indian subcontinent — aham brahmasmi, I am brahman, the idea of a philosophy that incorporates the spurning of hierarchy, the inclination to pray to a multitude of gods or none, the refusal to be defined by inherited caste, class, gender.

Zohran’s father told The New York Times this week that when they lived in South Africa when he was a child and all the children in Zohran’s class were asked to identify themselves as White, Black or Coloured, Zohran described himself as “mustard.” Yellow. The colour of haldi in a khichri.

Perhaps it is this idea of a khichri that is really the idea of India, a sort of One Nation, Many Melting Pots. Zohran K. is reminding us that the possibilities are endless.

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