Roti and roses: Why Zohran Mamdani’s win matters even in India

One day in 2009, when I worked for a city magazine in Mumbai, I received a call from a scriptwriter friend saying that director Mira Nair and her husband, the Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, were visiting from New York and wanted to drop by the office.

I assumed that Nair wanted to discuss her latest project so we could write about it or that Mamdani hoped that we would interview him about a recent book.

I was wrong. When they arrived, they had someone else with them: their teenaged son. Mamdani said that they were looking for a journalism internship for the boy. They had started the day at the Economic and Political Weekly, the weighty academic journal, and were ending it at Time Out Mumbai – from the sublime to the ridiculous,the professor seemed to imply. What opportunities could we offer the young man?

We did not have a structured programme for trainees so I suggested that we could send the teenager on assignments to Virar and other neighbourhoods at the furthest reaches of the train line to give him a clear-eyed view of the city.

I can't remember what specifically 18-year-old Zohran Mamdani said that evening but he seemed to be bright and engaged with the world around him. We did not hear back from him. I am not sure whether he actually did an internship in Mumbai eventually. (In June, the publisher of The Nation said on social media platform X that Mamdani had applied for an internship at the liberal American magazine – and was rejected.)

The memory of that meeting came back to me seven years later, when I read that the young man had taken the stage name Young Cardamom and was attempting to make a career in the world of rap. By 2019, he had tweaked his identity. He was now Mr Cardamom and he released a video, hilariously laced with profanity, titled Nani. It featured the octogenarian actress and cooking show host Madhur Jaffrey flashing her middle finger at the camera.

The next year, Scroll wrote about Mamdani for the first time. He was 29 and had just been elected to the New York State Assembly from the diverse constituency of Astoria. Even back then, he was championing the idea of controlling rents and increasing investments in health, housing and community services – issues that would mark his run for mayor four years later.

His campaign slogan at the time was “roti and roses” – a riff on the labour movement's self-evident assertion that humans require not just the basics of bread to live decently but also the beauty of roses.

“Our entire campaign believed that if you gave people the respect and dignity they deserve, they might be motivated to vote,” Mamdani had said.

On Tuesday, the improbable victory of this Muslim democratic socialist of South Asian descent in the New York mayoral election did not excite yelps of alarm from Trump supporters in the United States – it also elicited sneers from contrarians in the country in which Mamdani's parents had been born.

These cynics could not see why some Indians – whom they characterised as upper-class city dwellers, disinterested in the situation at home – were so interested in an election in a faraway country.

They were, of course, deliberately missing the point. Given that the Indian media has stoked vicarious pride in the rise of politicians, businesspeople and cultural figures of Indian descent around the world (Rishi Sunak, Sundar Pichai, Anushka Shankar), curiosity about a desi being elected mayor of a major global city was only natural.

Besides, the New York result wasn't of interest only to “India's self-proclaimed urban intelligentsia”, as politician Milind Deora of the Shiv Sena's Eknath Shinde faction described them. The victory of a Muslim candidate provided the opportunity for Hindutva supporters in India to air their own bigotry.

On Wednesday, Ameet Satam, the Mumbai chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party, an alliance partner of Deora's outfit, proclaimed that his supporters would “not tolerate a Khan being imposed on them” in the municipal election due shortly.

More tellingly, these quibblers are intentionally ignoring the similarities between Trump's America and Modi's India. Trump, in his second term, has been performing from the same authoritarian songbook that Modi has used for the past decade – only in double time. The score in both countries has involved attacking universities, invoking the threat of spectral internal enemies, promoting majoritarianism, questioning the conventions of citizenship and vowing to cleanse the body politic of “infiltrators”.

On Tuesday, the ebullient Mamdani demonstrated how the politics of grievance can be vanquished – with a singular focus on the issues that matter to ordinary people.

Over the next four years, well-wishers around the world will be closely following Mamdani's fight for roti and roses in New York, hoping that to find strategies that they can replicate in the places they live.

Mamdani, the mediocre rapper, would probably have made a good journalist. But he would seem to have an even-brighter future ahead as a politician.

Also read:

Free and fair polls? Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged large-scale rigging in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections, claiming that about 25 lakh fake voters had been added to the state's electoral rolls. He displayed a photograph of a woman, whom he claimed is a Brazilian model, alleging that her image was used in voter rolls of several constituencies.

Gandhi accused the Election Commission of helping the Bharatiya Janata Party by not removing the duplicate voters and covering up evidence by “destroying CCTV footage”. He also alleged that several BJP members were registered as voters in more than one state.

The system of “vote theft” had been “industrialised” and a similar manipulation would take place in the Bihar Assembly elections that began on Thursday, he added.

Also read: Five key takeaways from Gandhi's Haryana polls rigging allegations

‘Historic polling'. The voter turnout in the first phase of the Bihar Assembly elections was a record 64.6%, the Election Commission said. Polling took place in 121 of the 243 constituencies. The final phase of polling will take place on Tuesday before the votes are counted on November 14.

Tejashwi Yadav, the Opposition's chief ministerial candidate, alleged that the local administration was deliberately slowing down voting at several booths in constituencies considered strongholds of his Rashtriya Janata Dal and its allies. The poll panel said that the allegation was “baseless and misleading”.

The RJD claimed that the administration in Vaishali district had “systematically” halted vehicles heading to Raghopur through a bridge and boats from Kachchi Dargah. The Opposition party also claimed that the administration in the Danapur constituency had stopped boats from operating. This has deprived hundreds of voters of their voting rights, the party alleged.

The poll panel has not yet commented on the allegations.

Follow Scroll's coverage of the Bihar Assembly elections here

A Union minister booked. A first information report was registered against Union minister Lalan Singh after a video showed him urging supporters to prevent “a few leaders” from leaving their homes on the polling day in Bihar. The video widely shared online showed the Janata Dal (United) leader telling the crowd: “There are a few persons. Don't let them step out of their homes on polling day. Keep them packed inside.”

It was unclear when the comment was made. The “few leaders” Singh was referring to were Opposition leaders, according to reports.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal said that Singh was attempting to suppress voters and run a “bulldozer over the chest of the Election Commission”.

On Wednesday, Singh claimed that the video was doctored. He said that his remarks were misinterpreted and that his intention was to protect vulnerable voters allegedly being threatened by RJP workers.

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Source: Scroll
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