Ever since Zohran Mamdani entered the race for New York’s mayoral elections, his vitriolic anti-India diatribes started doing the rounds on social media, bringing to the surface the implicit and explicit hate that has underscored his campaign and the polls. As he emerged victorious, one question disturbingly loomed – will Mamdani’s hate speech against Modi, Hindus, and India take a backseat in the hectic pursuit of policy-making for one of the most diverse, busiest, and colourful cities in the world or get more amplified with the possession of political power? Before we answer the question, let us understand the rhetoric that fuelled his reputation as a divisive and controversial political figure. Zohran Mamdani, the son of Gujarati-origin Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani and Indian filmmaker, Mira Nayar, and a naturalised citizen of the United States has made his anti-Modi and anti-India stance very clear.
First, he organised and spoke at a rally against the Ram Mandir, repeatedly underlining his Indian Muslim origins and the pain and humiliation he felt at the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Further, Mamdani in another public appearance, claimed that Muslims in Gujarat had been “wiped out” during the 2002 post-Godhra riots and not a single Muslim survived in the state, an entirely false allegation. As per the 2011 census, 58.57 lakh Muslims lived in the state of Gujarat. This number has definitely increased proportionately as we wind down to the next census. Spouting utter lies to a constituency that does not know any better, Mamdani built for himself an ever-expanding woke-Left fortress which ultimately helped him secure over 50 per cent of the votes on polling day.
Another playbook that Mamdani employed with great success was identity marketing wherein he morphed into an Indian-American for the Indian-origin Hindu vote bank and a Muslim activist for the “Free Free Palestine” woke crowd. For the uber-educated, academically inclined, politically and racially aware voter, Mamdani tuned into a socialist revolutionary promising an explosion of liberal policy changes at the ground level bordering on Marxist lunacy. Now, the coming together of Islam and Marxism – the every embodiment of which is Zohran Mamdani – obviously appears to be not just contradictory but outrightly incompatible concepts. While Marxism denounces religion as the opium of the masses and a distraction from politico-economic issues, to put it simply, Islamism or radical Islam foregrounds religion as a political agenda for global domination.
Mamdani’s rise is a testament to this semantic contradiction, the very personification of Islamo-Marxism – a predatory ideology that is currently sweeping the West, and the rest of the world, materialising in the war cries of Free Palestine down the streets of New York, Berlin, Paris, London, you name it, which combines with woke-Leftism to form a deadly cocktail of perceived intellectual supremacy and suicidal empathy for what is perceived as Muslim victimhood but actually is the stealthy advance of radical Islam into academic, political, social and policy corridors of the West. In simple terms, radical Islam has taken control of the West in an insidious manner garbing itself with the cloak of Marxist, socialist and progressive politics. Whereas, in reality, radical Islam remains the most illiberal and regressive schools of thought, one that places a premium on the massacre and genocide of infidels and withdrawal of women from all vestiges of education and social life.
The ideological bulwark of Islamo-Marxism remains the cooption of the woke-Left youth through academic discourses, media propaganda and political mobilisation. The overwhelming presence of young university and college students in the various pro-Palestine protest rallies across the world bears this out. It cannot be discounted, however, that the seeds of Islamo-Marxist thought, that packages radicalisation as victimhood, germinate in classrooms across university campuses where academics – a number of them flush with funds from woke-Left and Islamic organisations – peddle a dangerous agenda. While the Muslim victims of Gaza are repeatedly invoked and showcased, no reference is made to the events of October 7, 2023 in Israel or the ongoing massacre of Christians in Nigeria. Or, for that matter, the targeted killing of Hindus in Bangladesh! This manner of academic brainwashing has proven to be mainly responsible for the large crowds that have been converging on streets in support of Gaza worldwide. Zohran Mamdani’s supporters broke into chants of “Free Palestine” at his victory rally too!
The surreptitious blanketing of radical Islam with Marxism has given rise to a whole generation of woke youth with clouded, uncritical, completely misplaced understanding of medieval, colonial and post-colonial histories and the development of insular or diverse polities thereafter. Which is why their assessment of post-colonial West and emerging powers like India is inverted and obtuse, while much of the rest of the world doesn’t really figure very high on their list of political priorities. This bunch of young “revolutionaries” and activists like Greta Thunberg and her flotilla friends – ensnared and coopted by Islamo-Marxism – form the bedrock of Mamdani’s voter base. In short, the woke-Left Islamo- Marxists ensured his victory. The Trump administration’s wishy-washiness on immigration and ridiculously illogical tariff policy did not do it any favours for sure, but the overwhelming win for Mamdani is signaling a hazardous portent for the future of the West. Comparisons have already started with Sadiq Khan’s London reeling under the ominous cloud of the Pakistani rape gang investigations and the continued influx of fighting-age immigrant men mainly from parts of the Islamic world.
The strategic alliance between the Islamists – brought to fruition through global jihad – and functional Marxism has produced a potential recipe that might end up posing an existential threat to the West. The fact that much of the Mamdani campaign was funded by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) which fronts the Muslim Brotherhood buttresses the argument about Islamo-Marxist cooption of the woke-Left agenda, vestiges of which can be seen in India as well. CAIR has been funding seminars and conferences in premier educational and research institutions such as IIT Gandhinagar and TISS, to name a few, furthering their attempt at pushing Islamo-Marxism and woke-Leftism through intellectual engagement. It would be useful to view Mamdani’s victory through this theoretical prism, therefore, instead of going overboard about his Indian heritage.
