… What links Mamdani’s rad-cum-loony left NYC campaign & the hard right’s hazing of Usha Vance & other right-wing PIOs is America’s politics of extremes & group targeting. There are some echoes in India, too …

TIMES OF INDIA 3/11/25

SEEMA SIROHI

        If running New York City were only as simple as making a TikTok video! Zohran Mamdani excels in one, and if he wins the crown, he will realise that sweet dreams are ‘not’ made of this. Cue the music since we are in the zone, and he is a lapsed rapper.
    Mamdani is the frontrunner in a sharply ideological mayoral race undergirded by fear that a socialist takeover of the citadel of capitalism is imminent. People might enjoy free bus rides, he promises, but the city is in deep crisis with a $5.5bn budget shortfall. It’s bleeding financial sector jobs, remains challenged by the Covid-related exodus of the middle-class and affluent, and might soon be looking for a bailout.
    NYC needs a financially educated mayor to manage its $110bn budget, not a sloganeer with surface interest in ‘affordable housing’ – Mamdani hasn’t taken a position on ballot proposals to build new housing. Why? Because unions don’t like the proposals that streamline permits and reduce their leverage.
    The Nov 4 vote will have national implications – the nature of American politics could change. If Mamdani wins, centrist Democrats will be under pressure to shift leftward or get out of the way. The more left the Dems become, the more right the Republicans will go in search of ‘common sense’ solutions with a new chant: ‘Save America First from ‘communism’.
    Mamdani has long embraced socialist politics – as many lefty immigrants tend to do in the safety of university campuses. But since his mayoral run got real, he’s been furiously cleaning up the past. Can he wipe all the spills? He has associated with radicals who justify the 9/11 attacks and mullahs who want to raise an Islamic army in America. His pro-Palestinian views resonate with younger voters, but his rhetoric scares others. He grew up with an academic father, Mahmood Mamdani, who has argued that suicide bombers should be recognised as ‘a category of soldiers’ and ‘a feature of modern political violence…’
    Junior Mamdani is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but not proud enough to embrace their full platform. He took the second-best (pragmatic) option — he ran as a Democratic Party candidate and became the nominee. He is at the centre of the fight for the party’s soul between leftists and centrists. Call it a civil war or political suicide, the Democratic establishment is confused, out of real ideas, and fighting generational change. If change means Mamdani, expect traditional voters to secede in greater numbers.
    Top Dems refused to endorse Mamdani for months. They fretted about his impractical agenda (free bus rides, free child care, rent freeze, more taxes on the rich), pro-Palestine, anti-Israel views and ‘defund-the-police’ calls in the past. As he rose in the polls, prominent Democrats gave a reluctant nod, which further advertised the party’s no-direction-home politics.
    The centrists want Andrew Cuomo to win even though he had lost the primary, thanks to a scandal-ridden past and a lacklustre campaign. The former NY state governor is forced to run as an independent despite being political royalty–he is the son of the legendary Mario Cuomo, a three-term governor.
    The big question: Can the centre/Cuomo hold? Even Trump would like that as a bona fide New Yorker in the White House with $1.1 bn in real estate holdings in the city. He labelled Mamdani ‘a communist’ early on and has threatened to withhold federal money if he wins. Cue your favourite apocalyptic music.
    Republicans were reluctant at first to the thought of a Mamdani win, as the ‘face’ of the Dems, he would ensure their victory in the midterms. Then it dawned on them that they too had a stake in America’s financial heart continuing to beat to a capitalist tune and not a socialist dirge.
    Cuomo has shown signs of life in the final stretch and narrowed Mamdani’s double-digit lead by 10 points in the latest polls. Can a last-minute surge lift him above a deeply controversial past and a terrible record? It helps that many groups, including a significant section of the Jewish community, do not want Mamdani as mayor.
    More than 1,100 rabbis across the country signed a letter, calling him a threat to the ‘safety and dignity of Jews in every city’. The candidate’s stance on Israel, the intifada and the slogans associated with Palestinian rights (‘globalise the intifada’, ‘from the river to the sea’) have caused deep disquiet. With antisemitism on the rise on both sides of the political divide, words matter more than ever. Mamdani refuses to endorse Israel’s right to exist as ‘a Jewish state’ and questions why any state should exist as a racial and religious entity. He also has strong views on Indian politics.
    The negatives are piling up on social media. Mamdani has campaigned with terrorist sympathisers, including Siraj Wahhaj, an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993. When challenged, Mamdani tends to play the victim card — Islamophobia is the root of all criticism, and people are afraid of getting the first Muslim mayor.
   Mamdani’s intense focus on his religious identity has disturbed many. It leads him to tell half-truths, and when fact-checked, he claims Islamophobia.
    The obsession with identity politics seems more important than revealing a clear path to funding all the free programmes he has so generously promised.
PS. What about the other half of his identity? He rarely talks about it.
DEVDUTT PATTANAIK
    A few weeks ago, FBI director Kash (Kashyap) Patel, son of Gujarati Patidar immigrants, via Uganda, was trolled by the American ‘fringe’ simply for wishing a Happy Diwali. Soon after, Vivek Ramaswamy, son of Tamil Brahmin immigrants, the Republican Party’s young conservative star, was mocked for being Hindu, not Christian. Sensing the shift in public narrative following the killing of Charlie Kirk, now seen as a  Christian martyr, Vice President JD Vance declared publicly that he hopes his wife, Usha, daughter of Telugu Brahmin immigrants, would convert to Christianity. But in today’s America, that is not enough.
    As Dinesh D’Souza – another Indian-origin right-wing figure, a Goan ‘Bamon’ Catholic from Mumbai- has painfully discovered. For the American Christian Nationalist, to be Christian means to be White. You can change your religion, but you cannot change your brown skin.
Bulldozer karma: For decades, Indians were celebrated as the “model minority” – hardworking, educated, apolitical. They added value without threatening local culture. But in recent years, that perception has shifted. Viral videos of noisy Diwali firecrackers in New York or Ganesh Visarjan processions in Australian rivers have transformed the Indian immigrants from polite contributors to cultural nuisances.
    The change is partly global. In an age of anxiety and economic contraction, borders harden and tolerance shrinks. In the 2022 New Jersey parade, a group of Indian Americans displayed a bulldozer float- a symbol of rising ‘Hindu power’ associated in India with demolishing homes of allegedly illegal Bangladeshi migrants. The irony was brutal: members of a traditionally vegetarian, non-violent community proudly identifying with an instrument of destruction. When criticised, they defended it as an act of “dharmic” outrage against 1,000 years of slavery and colonisation.
    Now, the bulldozers of American White Christian Nationalist outrage are rolling towards them. Indians abroad are learning what Muslims and Jews long knew- that in radicalised nationalism, today’s defender can become tomorrow’s enemy.
Old dharma, new drought: Ancient Vedic texts like Shatapatha Brahmana describe a simple law of scarcity: when the rains fail, and famine spreads, the strong consume the weak. Dharma, they say, is the opposite – when the strong protect the weak. Once, immigration embodied that spirit: strong nations offering opportunities to the less privileged. But today, the global economy is drowning in debt rather than water, and drought has returned. Scarcity squeezes out wisdom and compassion. The non-violent satvik vegetarian displays bloodlust. The Lady of Liberty is turning into a Karen.
    When compassion dries up, people cling to the most visible marker of belonging: the body itself. National borders can be crossed. Religions can be joined or left. But race cannot be escaped. You can baptise your name, but not your skin. Hence, in America, Christianity is not so much about being Jesus. It is about being white. Secularism in America, since the Declaration of Independence, has been about different Christian denominations, not Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus.
The irony for India: Indian Brahmins, who for decades positioned themselves as global interpreters of Hinduism, are watching uneasily. They once believed that aligning with Western power structures – speaking English, quoting Sanskrit and eating vegetarian – would ensure acceptance. They even argued that America was part of ‘akhand bharat’. That America was Patala or Sutala of Baliraja, and California was actually ‘Kapila-aranya’.
“For the American Christian Nationalist, to be a Christian means to be White…you can change your religion, but you cannot change your brown skin…This perhaps is the warning for India: when nationalism becomes racial, no myth of purity can save anyone.”
    Like American Mormons, whose Bible of the Latter Day Saints says Jesus resurrected in America, Sanatanis propagated a creative mytho-fiction that ancient Nagas travelled to America in Pushpak Viman and built the Mayan empire, based on principles of Maya. It helped explain the similarities seen in ancient native American civilisations and ancient Hindu tantra. One social media post even found Hanuman on the lost ruins of a temple in Honduras, linking it to Hanuman’s adventure with Mahiravana, ruler of the subterranean world.
But the new Christian nationalism has no patience with this ‘paganism’. They see Hindu vegetarianism as the seed of the ‘woke-vegan’ movement. They see Ganesh and Hanuman as demons. American Christian fundamentalists are aware of how Christian missions in the tribal Northeast and central India are being attacked. They have not forgotten the murder of Graham Staines and his children in Odisha in 1999 by Hindu extremists.
And perhaps this is the warning for India: when nationalism becomes racial, no myth of purity can save anyone. Someday, someone will ask whether the Aryans themselves were immigrants – outsiders who came on horseback 3,500 years ago. When that question returns, as it surely will, every bulldozer of identity will find its target.

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Posted by Kamlesh Tripathi

Author, Poet, & Columnist

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