Uganda, India and beyond: What Zohran Mamdani’s win reveals about the insecurities of expulsion

Zohran Mamdani’s sensational defeat of the Democratic Party establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary election is reverberating in the US and globally. His win has revealed the weaknesses of the Democratic Party and the potential for a progressive-left alternative within the party.

Commentators largely view Mamdani as South Asian and Muslim, in line with contemporary US racial and religious identity formations. After October 7, 2023, and the ensuing US military-backed Israeli siege and genocide in Gaza, Mamdani was subject to virulent Islamophobia and xenophobic attacks for his criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies on Gaza.

He continues to be subject to intensifying accusations of anti-Semitism. given his support for Palestinian rights.

But Mamdani’s political platform to make New York City an affordable city is not only shaped by democratic socialist principles connected to freedom struggles in the US like the Civil Rights Movement. Mamdani’s class consciousness and identity is based on his Ugandan and Indian heritage and histories of anti-imperialist, racial and class struggle in Uganda.

This context sheds light on alternative South Asian diaspora politics, and a deeper critique of Democratic Party neoliberal identitarian politics. These critiques are possible without ceding power to the anti-diversity and supremacist machinations of right-wing politics in power today, from...

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