Not just freebies. It was Zohran Mamdani’s moral pull that made the young campaign for him

On November 1, I joined a group of a few hundred supporters of Zohran Mamdani in a heavily immigrant neighbourhood of Queens, New York City. Labelled as the “Muslims and South Asians for Zohran” rally, I was surrounded by Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani Muslim groups in the city, along with some representation from the group Hindus for Zohran. 

One could hear Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Arabic in the audience, but in all of the languages, one could sense anticipation for the arrival of their preferred candidate for Mayor of New York.

Democratic Congressman representing Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna, had flown in to support the campaign. He got on stage and announced, “Growing up in Philadelphia, if someone had told me a Hindu Indian Congressman representing Silicon Valley would be introducing a Muslim Indian who’s going to be the next Mayor of New York City, I would have said, ‘Only in a Mira Nair (referring to Zohran’s filmmaker mother) movie.’ But it is happening here!”

Zohran got on stage to an electric reception, as if a rockstar had gotten on to play his best hits. He delivered his three most popular campaign promises: one, freeze the rent; two, make buses fast and free; and three, deliver universal childcare. 

Every person in that park knew these catchphrases like the back of their hands. In fact, they all sang these promises along with him.

The Democratic Party in the US had turned into the party of the elite, highly educated and upper-class people. Ironically, the billionaire Donald Trump, backed by other billionaires, is who working-class Americans had come to trust in addressing their anxieties. Disconnected, self-absorbed Democrats told everyone that the economy was strong and everything was going well. So those who were being left behind in that economy, including a section of minorities like Blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

On November 10, 2024, a few days after Kamala Harris lost the election, Zohran went deep into Trump-supporting neighbourhoods in New York City with a microphone and camera to talk to those voters.

Why had they voted for Trump? They had one message: everything had become too expensive, and they could not make ends meet anymore with the way things were going. Democrats said they had lost faith in the system and found it pointless to keep voting for the Democrats since nothing changed in their lives.

Appeals to the working class

In 2021, Zohran had led a 15-day hunger strike, successfully winning debt relief for taxi drivers in the city. In Zohran’s framing of the city’s problems, the villains of this time are the billionaire class, individually naming and shaming the men who poured upwards of $40 million into the smear campaign deployed against him to boost his opponent. 

In his victory speech, he declared the victory of New York’s aam aadmi against the oligarchy that had kept them out of power all this while. Indeed cannot miss the uncanny similarities between Zohran’s politics and earlier movements like India Against Corruption that gave birth to the Aam Aadmi Party, which sought to upend the old order and change the way things were done. 

Zohran’s promise of free buses for all is almost identical to Kejriwal’s free bus service for women in Delhi. Throughout the campaign, he was constantly badgered – where will the money come from for all these freebies? And pat would come the reply – we will eliminate waste and abuse in government and increase taxes on the wealthy.

These ‘populist’ campaigns captured a yearning for an alleviation of the material conditions in which people lived. It built a class coalition that bridged the divides of race, ethnicity or caste identities. But just espousing the right policy platform cannot explain the electoral success of rank outsiders with no meaningful resources at their disposal. 

What Zohran’s campaign did successfully was to mobilise a disillusioned, disenchanted youth that had disengaged from politics to become the footsoldiers who would carry the winning message door to door. Zohran enlisted over 100,000 canvassers who knocked on 4.4 million doors – an unprecedented ground effort in the city.

Why Zohran was able to build such a formidable cadre of young people is crucial to draw lessons for any future political campaigns that seek to replicate his success. 

It is not as though the armies of young volunteers all needed the free buses, rent freezes and childcare. 

They volunteered their time for this campaign because they felt a moral pull towards the idealism of someone who had the courage to stand up to the dogmas of the past – someone who could speak truth to power.

Uncompromising positions

Zohran ran a campaign that would have caused panic attacks for any Democratic Party campaign professional. In a city historically aligned with Israel as the home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, he criticised Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He said he would heed the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In the capital of capitalism, he went on CNN and proclaimed that he has several critiques of capitalism and is a socialist. 

In a city that experienced a huge spike in Islamophobia in the aftermath of 9/11, he wore his Muslim identity proudly on his sleeve. Despite incessant hateful attacks from Hindu Gujarati groups in the city over his criticism of Indian PM Narendra Modi and the Hindutva ideology, he did not back down from his beliefs. Every step along the way, he demonstrated his unwillingness to pretend to be someone he was not, just to appease anyone.

In a sea of cowardly politicians who only dared to say what surveys and focus groups told them was acceptable to the public, Zohran set himself apart. He did what a leader is supposed to do – he led his supporters on moral questions and persuaded those who didn’t support him to come around to his worldview. 

Instead of responding to the limitations of public appetite for radical ideas with compromise, he shaped public opinion with conviction and clarity.

On July 31, 2024, I had watched a video of his on Twitter where he was trying to address frustrations of New Yorkers with the public transport system. It was clear he was going to run for something soon. I shared it with a friend who had some background in NYC politics to find out what he thought. “He’s a super lefty DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) type which is way to the left of the city generally and so he will make a lot of noise but likely get mostly ignored,” he said. My friend was right – Zohran started out as being to the left of the average New Yorker. But over the past year, he took New York with him on his journey of making sense of the world around us.

Every attempt was made to stoke fear – they called him a jihadist communist, threatening the downfall of New York through the flight of capital if he got elected. But the combined power of his message and his integrity meant that over 50 per cent of voters chose him anyway.

This election is a reminder that politics does not need to be about hate, divisiveness, compromise, and corruption. It can be a vehicle that inspires people to have the audacity of hope. 

If anyone is still in disbelief that Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist, born in Uganda to parents of Indian origin, is set to take charge of the wealthiest city in the world, then you’re joined by none other than the Mayor-Elect’s mother. 

At an event toward the closing of the campaign, a group of Hindu priests and other faith leaders had gathered to chant prayers for Zohran’s victory. I spotted the Mayor-Elect’s mother Mira Nair standing at the back of the gathering. I went up to her and said, “I just wanted to share with you – I used to work in Indian politics before I moved to the United States. Your son has inspired me in many of the same ways those movements once did.” 

She teared up and said, “Isn’t it unbelievable... what our Zohran has done.”

Disclaimer: The writer is a lawyer and has been part of several Aam Aadmi Party election campaigns.