The 34-year-old Ugandan-born Indian, the immigrant son of a Columbia University professor and a decorated film-maker, is a true anachronism in today’s world. After all, how did he ever emerge from nowhere, a socialist, to take the mayoralty of New York, America’s most iconic city, from under the nose of Donald Trump’s politics?
Mamdani himself, to be so politically active given his tender years, has never attempted to shake off his ‘privilege', his freedom to question the social and political diversity of his adopted home. However, he may well acknowledge that the city of New York is a very different beast than the United States of America is, the city being possibly the greatest cultural ‘melting pot', the world has ever known, while the wider nation is a bible-thumping bastion of ultra-conservatism, NY seethes and bubbles under, in every way.
Within that paradox lies the challenge of being responsive, not only given his diversity, to a massive immigrant-based city population, from Italy, Ireland, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with all their cultural and religious heterogeneity, but questions whether he will also be responsive and relevant, to the staunch, bold, often arrogant ‘New Yorker'. Will he be able to navigate their sense that, though Osama bin Laden no longer lives, retribution has been comparatively insignificant, and through gritted teeth, that is still, to generations of New Yorkers, offensive.
Zohran’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is Ugandan-born and served as Director of the Makerere Institute for Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, until 2022. He is the current Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, also holding professorships in African Studies, Political Science and Anthropology. He also holds numerous honorary academic distinctions and specialises in colonialist and post-colonialist politics. One should imagine, I suppose, that the political nurturing of the younger Mamdani has been well cast then, in the socialist perspective, though maybe lacking balance or diversity of its own making.
Certainly, in his book entitled ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim', Mamdani Snr at length debates that there is no real distinction, unless as a rebuttal of propositions by prominent anthropologists, Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, and Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, that Islam was tethered only by bloodshed, and that a war of ‘civilisations’ was a certainty. Mamdani offers that the difference in American eyes is only that ‘good Muslims’ support American Middle Eastern policies, while their ‘bad’ counterparts do not.
Mira Nair has achieved prominence in the film industry, having first directed the 1991 drama ‘Mississippi Masala', which starred Denzil Washington, as one half of a mixed-race marriage, with its hypocrisy maybe a reflection of Idi Amin’s Uganda of the time. The movie was an acclaimed success. Then followed her 2001 comedy, ‘Monsoon Wedding', sort of an Indian take on Richard Curtis type cinema, humorous, yet poignant. ‘The Namesake (2006)’ portrays the cross-cultural struggles of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, Bengali immigrants to the United States, and their American-born children, Gogol and Sonia.
My concern then is not that Zohran Mamdani is socialist, communist, or even democrat, but that he will find himself so restricted by his youth and inexperience that he will ‘rule’ his city-to-be only from that singular context. That the panorama he sees from his office will not be of Alicia Key’s “concrete jungle where dreams are made,” of which Simone de Beauvoir echoed, “There is something of New York that makes sleep useless,” and of which John Steinbeck was adamant that, “Once it becomes your home, no other place is good enough.”
He has George Soros’ millions to sustain him fiscally, two respected, doting, academic and artistic parents to sustain his philosophical and political contentions, and a Syrian-born, former UAE resident, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist activist wife Rama Duwaji to keep him focused. It’s clear, much will hinge on how these three key elements will influence the balance with which the young man rules from the day he assumes office on January 1, 2026.
Can he navigate the murky politics? Is social change genuinely possible? Can he make $30 per hour minimum wages happen? Or will the great ‘clobbering machine’ wear him down? Billy Joel sang of “knowing what I'm needing, and I don't want to waste more time, I'm in a New York state of mind.” And that is the one thing this tyro politician is going to need if he is to succeed... a true New York, state of mind.
Ray Petersen
The writer is a media consultant
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