Vivek
Menezes
lready unhinged by the erratic antics of Donald Trump, the American political scene has become even further deranged by the emergence of 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani as lead contender for the next mayor of New York City.
Idealistic, charming and persuasively progressive, this obviously beloved only child of highly accomplished parents of Indian origin (his Rourkela-born Harvard-educated mother is the famous film director Mira Nair, and his Ugandan Ismaili father Mahmood is one of the leading public intellectuals of our times) has become an instant litmus test that is polarising opinions far beyond the borders of his city and state. It has been absolutely shocking to observe so many powerful Americans including Trump himself come straight out and attempt to destroy this literal kid - even our young Panjim mayor is older than him – in the same week their Congress approved an astonishingly regressive bill cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from medical insurance, food benefits and green energy, while dramatically ramping up the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to the point where it will be the sixteenth-highest funded military on the planet (for example, both Israel and Italy spend less on their actual armed forces).
Of course, it is precisely because Mamdani represents an impressive resistance to this overtly fascist and increasingly openly enthno-nationalist Trumpist takeover that he is being hammered with slurs, slander, and outright lies. This incessant drummed-up vitriol – the term “moral panic” accurately describes such hate campaigns – was already getting very bad during the young candidate’s energetic and super-exciting primary campaign, when he came up from 1% in the polls to soar far ahead of Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic party heavyweight and former Governor of New York whose father was also Governor before him. One morning, fighting back tears, he shared that “I get messages that say the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim. I get threats on my life, on the people that I love. When I speak with emotion, I am then characterised as being a monster [with] language that describes almost a barbarian, looking to dismantle civilisation. And part of this is the very sad burden of what it means to be the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor, is to deal with dehumanising language.”
Sadly, everything has become even more volatile and vicious after Mamdani won the Democratic ticket, by striking an unconventional and notably joyous close-knit bond with Brad Lander, another primary candidate who is the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in New York. Side by side in comfortable camaraderie, they showed up Cuomo as irrelevant and out of touch, thus neutralising the senior politician’s massive funding advantages. Their remarkable partnership played out like pure magic, and that is when seemingly everyone everywhere began to tune in to what really does represent a potential better politics of the future. Here is just one relevant take, from the venerable Jewish-American publication The Forward: “Lander modelled what principled solidarity looks like. His actions helped ensure that a powerful, justice-oriented Muslim leader remained in the race for mayor. He demonstrated that Jewish safety does not require Muslim silence. That, in fact, our safeties are intertwined. Israeli politicians who believe in democracy, who believe in equality, who believe in a future where all citizens belong — this is your moment. Speak up. Say the thing that’s hard to say. Stand with your Palestinian colleagues. Be like Brad.”
Such commentary comes across as almost unthinkable in our fraught times, and it is true that even if most people recognise this Mamdani moment as pure lightning in a bottle - the very definition of successful democracy in action - for others the young candidate is more of a lightning rod, attracting a firestorm of condemnation. So far, he has been holding up remarkably well, even deftly turning the tables, as in this fine response after the President bashed him: “yesterday, Donald Trump said that I should be arrested. He said that I should be deported. He said that I should be denaturalised. And he said those things about someone who stands to be the first immigrant mayor of this city in generations, someone who would also be the first Muslim and the first South Asian mayor in this city's history. It is less so because of who I am, because of where I come from, because of how I look or how I speak, and more so because he wants to distract from what I fight for. I fight for working people. Ultimately it is easier for him to fan the flames of division than to acknowledge the ways in which he has betrayed those working-class Americans not just in this city but across this country, and the ways in which he continues to betray them.”
There’s a lot of truth to the old line that “you can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies” and it is certainly valid for this handsome, hugely likeable idealist. An avowed democratic socialist – actually by Indian standards he’s barely on the left – Mamdani is hugely popular with young people, despite being continually vilified by an army of hacks and hypocrites from Trump on down. Earlier this week the hate was about eating biryani with his hands about which Congressman Brandon Gill – who is married to the Goan-American conservative commentator Danielle D’Souza Gill – tweeted sharply that “Civilized people in America don’t eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.” A couple of days later, another conservative commentator with Goan roots, Sadanand Dhume similarly lashed out in the Wall Street Journal that “Mamdani brings Third World prejudices to New York”. This weekend, there is an absurd New York Times hit piece about how Mamdani ticked off (complicated, stupid, typically American) boxes about his racial affiliations in an unsuccessful Columbia University application from when he was a teenager, and next week there will be some other manufactured outrage. We can expect much more of the same right until the election in November.
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature
Festival)