Touchstones: Young Mamdani & old order

When one has been writing a column for as long as I have, there is a danger of either repeating oneself or becoming slowly irrelevant. Each time I sit down to write a fresh one, I am confronted with the question of what now? Fortunately, there is always something happening in our country or the world that throws me a lifeline. This time, it is the spectacular victory of young Zohran Mamdani in the run-up to the mayoral elections to be held later this year in New York that has stirred a hornet’s nest there. These are those moral and ethical questions relevant for not just the USA, but issues that all democracies will have to eventually confront.

For one, this primary has introduced a radical young person into the geriatric world of established political parties and dynasts. Zohran has the infectious idealism of youth and comes with no baggage of an established party line. The battle between the Republicans and the Democrats in the US has been so poisoned by the recent performances of these two parties that they have drifted away from their middle-class voter. Again, the world over, there is a huge churn that has thrown up entrenched and right-leaning leaders, although many of them have been denied an outright victory. The two exceptions are Trump in the US and our own PM, who came back with impressive numbers.

However, most of Europe is now being torn between the Left and Right parties and are able to survive only if they make compromises or arrangements with their rivals. Naturally, all such governments find their hands tied and feel frustrated with how little they can do when faced with the Big Bully in America. Their profligate welfarism has drained their economies while their dithering stand on the war between Russia and Ukraine, to say nothing of their shameful support for Israel and indifference to the human condition of the Palestinians, is now beginning to invite contempt from not just many in the world but from their own people as well.

Moreover, their unpopular governments are perpetuating these senseless wars because their own survival is under threat if they have to face an election. I am not even going to mention what the West has done to South Asia and the Middle East because they think they can get away with sheer racist arrogance. They seem trapped by their old colonial past and have never really accepted that the Empire they once ruled over had rejected them long ago. The White Man’s Burden has acquired a radically different connotation and they cannot accept that their erstwhile colonies have made their own destinies since they went back many decades ago. Today, they appear as pitiful cartoons of their ancestors and are being outpaced by the very countries they once lorded over.

Lashing out at immigrants and expelling them is a measure of how deep the fear of being swamped by those who are not white goes. Whether in Europe, the UK or the US, they cannot survive without the brown and black hands that handle their industries, their healthcare and their farms. Zohran challenges all these ostrich-like attitudes. He’s proudly brown, a Muslim who is unafraid to declare his faith, a liberal anti-capitalist and actually dares to promise the New York middle class a life of dignity, equality and inclusion. His words have sent shivers down the spine of both the old Democrats and Republicans. And when they cannot match his stirring oratory, they have resorted to calling him names and stooping to levels of public rebuke and threats that would shame even our loonies in India.

Wisely, Zohran has kept his cool. He speaks in fluent Hindustani, English and a language of solidarity with the excluded that reaches out to his supporters. He eats with his fingers and wears his mixed parental upbringing without offending either. He is supremely confident and handles the press like a pro and like his filmmaker mother, knows how to handle drama and emotion with restraint and effect. From his father, he gets a deep understanding of post-colonial societies and from Africa and India, a verve that is palpable. One only hopes he does not turn out to be the Arvind Kejriwal of America.

I asked myself why I was so moved by the phenomenon of the rise of Zohran Mamdani, despite many reservations about the reckless promises and over-confidence so typical of a young radical. I think it is about how our generation went through all the subsequent phases and came out more and more disillusioned and cynical after the first few decades of Independence. “Bliss was it then to be alive but to be young was very heaven,” as Wordsworth said post the French Revolution. A few centuries later, the view he immortalised in ‘From Westminster Bridge’ that opens with “Earth has nothing more fair to show” is a vista that is poisoned by decline and fear. The church, the family, its splendid welfare state and its outstanding educational institutions have all but vanished, leaving in their wake a society sans ethics and morality, broken homes, deviant youth and a frustrated countryside.

I sincerely hope that young Mamdani has it in him to write a new script that is not just the old Anglo-Saxon one, but one that binds the world with threads of humanity and brotherhood.

— The writer is a social commentator

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