‘Why Zohran Mamdani would never be a mayor in Gujarat’

By Andy Mukherjee

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary has, quite expectedly, triggered India’s Hindu right-wing. It has branded him as a jihadi Islamist, and a Hindu-hater, although his mother, the celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, is a Hindu.

Even to India’s liberals, Mamdani’s campaign is a matter of some envy. After all, what’s the chance of a Muslim politician coming this close to governing a major city in Gujarat, the western Indian state of about 72 million people to which Mamdani traces his patrilineal roots? Unfortunately, the answer in the current political environment is pretty much zero.

This thought experiment has no room for economics: New York City’s annual $116 billion budget dwarfs the combined spending by all Indian municipalities. And although the western coastal region has considerable wealth — Asia’s two richest tycoons, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, are Gujaratis — it isn’t exactly cosmopolitan, or progressive. The society has harbored a suspicion of Muslims as invaders, dating back to the sacking of a prominent Hindu temple by an Afghan raider in 1026 AD, a significant event in the local popular culture.

Yet Ahmedabad, the state’s largest city, elected its first Muslim woman mayor — even after the 2002 communal riots in which more than 1,000 people died, mostly Muslims. But Aneesa Begum Mirza was also Ahmedabad’s last Muslim mayor. The widespread violence, a culmination of decades of religious polarisation, left in its wake a belligerent form of Hindu nationalism. Under Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat between 2001 and 2014, the political space for Muslims shrank.

In 2014, Modi became prime minister, and the “invisibilisation” of India’s biggest religious minority — to borrow a term used by political scientist Mirza Asmer Beg — became a national phenomenon. India has about 200 million followers of Islam, 14 per cent of the population. But less than 4.5 per cent of the elected parliamentarians are Muslims, down from 9 per cent in 1980. None of these 24 lawmakers are from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. For the first time in the 75-year history of the secular republic, the federal government has no Muslim ministers.

In Gujarat, the 182-member state assembly has one Muslim member. Expect this to change. The community has been increasingly ghettoized under a draconian 1991 legislation that stratifies the property market along communal lines in neighborhoods the administration considers to be prone to violence. Now that the process is complete, Modi’s party has begun fielding Muslim candidates from Muslim quarters in civic polls.

Mamdani has publicly held Modi responsible for the 2002 riots, even though the Indian Supreme Court dismissed the case against the prime minister in 2022. The New Yorker, were he to aspire to a political role in Gujarat, wouldn’t be contesting on a BJP ticket. That much is certain. What’s more disappointing to liberals is that even the once-dominant Indian National Congress, whose leader Rahul Gandhi is Modi’s biggest opponent and challenger, wouldn’t have much use for someone like Mamdani.

Aneesa Mirza in Ahmedabad, and Kadir Pirzada, who was mayor 37 years ago in Surat, Gujarat’s second-largest city, represented the Congress. But the party of India’s freedom struggle has also been changed by the communal cleavage. As the King’s College professor Christophe Jaffrelot argues in his book, Gujarat Under Modi, the Congress could have prevented the rise of the religious right if it had supported a chief minister who in the 1980s was aiming for a social coalition of disadvantaged Hindu castes and Muslims. The party lost its nerve after upper-caste protests against affirmative-action quotas in jobs and education took an anti-minority turn. The chief minister resigned, and the BJP became powerful.

And now the Congress leadership is pinned down. Every day social media users call on the party to prove that it’s not against the majority community. Modi’s campaign during last year’s general election showed just how far discourse has shifted. “If you are a non-Muslim,” said a video, posted under the BJP’s Instagram handle, “Congress will snatch your wealth and distribute it to Muslims. Narendra Modi knows of this evil plan. Only he has the strength to stop it.” The video was deleted, but not before it had gone viral.

Only in the eyes of Laura Loomer and a few other ultra-conservative US media personalities is Mamdani’s Muslim identity central to his candidacy. That isn’t how most voters in New York judge him. To his supporters, he’s a 33-year-old “democratic socialist” empathetic to the electorate’s everyday struggles with rents, childcare and transportation costs. To his detractors, the former C-list rapper is just a social-media sensation, a dangerous populist who will raise taxes and waste public funds on city-owned grocery stores. To President Donald Trump, he’s a “100 per cent Communist Lunatic,” with a grating voice. “He looks TERRIBLE.”

Mamdani’s support for Gaza — and opposition to Israel — might yet put the spotlight on his religious beliefs in the November mayoral election. In many parts of northern and western India, however, there can be no politician whose primary identity is not his or her religion or caste, the two axes around which votes are mobilised.

To have a hypothetical political role in Gujarat, Mamdani would have to fit himself into a straitjacket. He could perhaps represent the Congress in a Muslim-dominated constituency. All hell might break loose, however, if Mamdani tried to stand for something other than his religion. Take Umar Khalid. The former student leader and rights activist from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, an avowed communist and atheist, has spent almost five years in jail for his alleged involvement in the 2020 Delhi Riots. His trial hasn’t started yet; nor has his political career.

Mamdani has done a public reading of Khalid’s prison diaries. He knows the lay of the land and speaks at least one local language (Hindi) fluently. Throw in a choreographed dandiya dance, and he may be eminently electable in any Gujarati city. But he would probably never get a ticket. That isn’t his problem. It’s India’s.