‘It’s cool to see that a brown person can be in City Hall’: In Mamdani’s win, many communities that rallied behind him find a voice

At the recently concluded watch party at the cafe, South Asians were wishing each other “Mamdani Mubarak” and embracing as if it were Eid. One Indian in the crowd said she feels like distributing mithai. Another New Yorker, whose parents moved from Uttar Pradesh many decades ago, said that the night felt “unbelievable” as she had hardly seen any Indians while growing up in the city.

In his victory speech, delivered to a jubilant crowd at the Brooklyn Paramount, Mamdani invoked India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, quoting from the historic Tryst with Destiny address: “A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. Tonight, New York has done just that.”

At the watch party at Moka & Co, a Yemeni cafe in Astoria, Queens. (Credit: Surbhi Gupta)

As he wrapped up, the title track from the 2004 Bollywood hit Dhoom rang out across the hall — followed by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind, which took on new resonance as Mamdani made history.

At the watch party, Shabeena Gilani, a tech professional in her 50s and a Muslim American of Indian origin, reflected on how her family — who moved from Chennai to New York City in the ’70s to Brooklyn — could never have imagined that someone like Mamdani would one day be elected mayor.

Although she now lives in Long Island, Gilani regularly travelled into the city to canvas for Mamdani and even helped her parents, now in their 80s and 90s and living in Staten Island, cast their votes for him. “We’re excited not only because Zohran is South Asian and Muslim, but because he’s so authentic,” she said. “It’s cool to see that a brown person can be in City Hall.”

Mamdani, son of acclaimed Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair and India-origin Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, ran a campaign centred on affordability — including rent freezes, universal childcare, and faster, free buses — striking a chord with New Yorkers grappling with rising living costs and housing insecurity.

At the watch party at Moka & Co, a Yemeni cafe in Astoria, Queens. (Credit: Surbhi Gupta)

When the democratic socialist Mamdani launched his campaign in October 2024, he was widely seen as a long shot, with analysts giving him barely a 1% chance of winning. Yet he pulled off one of the great political upsets in recent American history. His Democratic primary win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 13 points had shaken both the nation and the Democratic Party, which is grappling with a generational and ideological shift. The general election win has cemented that transformation.

Mamdani captured more than one million votes in what became New York City’s highest‑turnout mayoral election in decades — and won a popular mandate with just over 50% of the vote share, beating Cuomo, who ran as an independent.

Born in Kampala, Uganda, Mamdani moved with his family to South Africa and then New York City at the age of seven. After studying Africana studies at Bowdoin College and working as a housing counsellor and rapper, he entered politics and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, winning reelection in 2022 and 2024.

“This is a very exciting moment for South Asians,” Reshma Patel, district leader for Manhattan’s 74th district, told The Indian Express. “For many years — especially post-9/11 — second-generation South Asians in the US, have been trying to organise, get out the vote, encourage people to run for office, but we haven’t been able to build sustained momentum. Zohran has made that happen,” she said.

Sonya Soni, a volunteer with DRUM Beats, a prominent South Asian organisation in New York, described the emotional impact of Mamdani’s victory. “Even though I grew up in the US, I’ve never felt like America belonged to me. But this is the first time I’ve felt like — oh, New York can be for me,” she told The Indian Express.

His campaign had been instrumental in getting thousands of South Asian and Muslim voters to cast ballots for the first time and making them a prominent part of the city’s polling infrastructure after remaining unaccounted for in previous elections.

Mamdani first drew attention locally during a 14-day hunger strike with New York City taxi drivers — who are predominantly South Asian — over the medallion debt crisis, which resulted in a historic debt relief agreement. Yet when he launched his mayoral campaign, Mamdani’s name had little recall, even within South Asian spaces, and few knew he was Mira Nair’s son.

At the watch party at Moka & Co, a Yemeni cafe in Astoria, Queens. (Credit: Surbhi Gupta)

His campaign, however, captured national imagination. In an America grappling with deep political divides under a new Trump administration, many have said Mamdani’s campaign has brought hope and joy back to politics. From scavenger hunts to soccer tournaments and viral memes, it made political campaigning feel fun. His branding with bold blues, oranges, and reds and its playful, inclusive energy inspired a wave of affinity groups, from Moms for Mamdani to Shias for Zohran and even Cats for Zohran.

At the same time, it was also the most unapologetically South Asian election in American political history.

Even though Mamdani did not emphasise his identity in the beginning, early support from South Asian and East Asian working-class organisations, such as DRUM Beats and CAAAV Voice, and celebrities such as Kal Penn, Ali Sethi and Poorna Jaggannath, helped put his name on the map. At the time of winning the primary on June 24, he acknowledged the “Bangladeshi aunties” who campaigned for him.

In Jackson Heights, a historic hub for desi communities, Mamdani hosted a midnight dinner at Kabab King, serving kababs and chicken biryani to doctors and taxi drivers. The next day, he introduced Rajnigandha, the iconic Indian mouth freshener, to a content creator. On Diwali, Mamdani distributed mithai from an Indian sweet shop alongside his mother Mira and actor Kal Penn, apart from going on a temple trail.

Pakistani legend Noor Jehan’s niece, Saima Jehan, sang a viral campaign song in Urdu. Mamdani’s own rap Nani, from his earlier persona, Mr Cardamom, with a video featuring Madhur Jaffery, resurfaced and found a new wave of popularity. Dhol-funk band Red Baraat performed at a rally of over 13,000 people in Queens last week.

Months earlier, Mamdani had used mango lassi as a prop and drew playful references to ’70s Hindi films, even striking the classic Shah Rukh Khan pose to explain ranked-choice voting to desi voters. “When that campaign video came out, it was incredible… I already liked Zohran, but the video took it over the top — brilliantly executed, full of Bollywood references. I’ve run for office myself, and nothing compared to the creativity of that campaign,” said Patel.

Recalling Mamdani’s early days of low visibility, Soni said, “It’s funny to think about it now. Just last summer, I was at a DJ Rekha concert in Queens and saw Zohran there. I got so excited, but my friend had no idea who he was. I told her, ‘He worked on taxi debt relief in 2021 — he’s incredible.’ He laughed and said, ‘No one ever comes up to me.’ That was only a year and a few months ago.”

But now local media equate Mamdani’s celebrity to Beatlesmania — a political fandom that has spilled into the streets, with crowds chanting his name, selfies flooding social media and reporters tracking his every move.

But it was tough to canvas for Mamdani in the beginning, said Soni. When DRUM Beats endorsed him in October, no one cared,” she said. “I would talk to halal cart owners, cab drivers — many of them Bangladeshi — who assumed he was Pakistani. They’d say, ‘We won’t vote for him,’ because of that tension between communities. But once we explained his policies — especially how he stood up for the taxi drivers — people began to trust him.

“Now, I’d say 70 to 80 per cent of the South Asian diaspora is excited,” she said. “Even those who disagree are engaging in ways I’ve never seen. I spent one night at a Kali temple talking with an uncle until two in the morning. He didn’t agree with all of Zohran’s policies, but he listened. That kind of intergenerational dialogue just didn’t happen before,” she said.

In the last few months, Mamdani has not only changed how political campaigning is done in the US, but has reshaped South Asian American politics by building a broad coalition across nationalities — Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Indo-Caribbean — and religions, including Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, offering an uncommon model of cross-identity solidarity.

“Zohran embodies so many South Asian and other identities. His very personhood invites people to participate and bring their communities with them, whether Indians or diasporic groups like Indo-Caribbeans. The fact that he is both Hindu and Muslim, and the way he communicates, has brought together a broad spectrum of South Asians and beyond,” said Sunita Viswanath, executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, who worked with Mamdani on multiple projects, including anti-caste legislation in New York, and was among his early supporters, leading the affinity group, Hindus for Zohran.

The weekend before the election, Hindus for Zohran hosted a prayer gathering attended by his mother, Mira Nair, who had largely stayed out of the public eye during the campaign. “Zohran was due on my birthday,” she recalled. “But true to form, he chose his own moment to come — declared even at birth, his quiet insistence to chart his own path.” Earlier in June, at a Monsoon Wedding screening in New York, Nair mentioned that she had once offered her son the lead role in A Suitable Boy, which he had turned down.

Later that day, at a “South Asians & Muslims for Zohran” rally in Queens — where chants of “Amar mayor, Tomar mayor, Mamdani, Mamdani!” (“My mayor, your mayor, Mamdani!”) in Bangla echoed through the crowd of over 1,000 people — Congressman Ro Khanna — one of the few prominent Indian Americans politicians to endorse Mamdani — introduced him with cinematic flair. “If you had asked me in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whether an Indian American of Hindu faith, representing Silicon Valley, would be introducing an African-born Indian of Muslim faith as the next mayor of New York — I’d have said, only in a Mira Nair film,” he quipped.

In the crowd was Indian-origin American R&B and soul singer-songwriter Zeshan B, whose video went viral during the campaign (with over 1 million views on Instagram). He had rewritten the lyrics of his song Never Turn Away in Urdu/Hindi in support of Mamdani while performing at Mayor Eric Adams’ event at Gracie Mansion. “Boy, I gotta say, it felt so apropos to sing Aaram Hai Haram — the iconic chant that Nehru and our grandparents used to sing — in the context of Zohran,” Zeshan told The Indian Express. “I swelled with pride to invoke our ancestors’ aashirwaad.”

The growing political influence of South Asians during the election, particularly around Mamdani, had also prompted other candidates to actively court the community. Major contenders — including Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Eric Adams — visited Hindu temples (apart from gurudwaras and mosques) across the city. On Diwali Eve, Cuomo launched “South Asians for Cuomo” only to be mocked for confusing and calling them Southeast Asians at first. This was in addition to the other pro-Cuomo Hindu groups who had been campaigning for him.

People within the South Asian diaspora emphasise that they have not lent their support to Mamdani only because of his identity. “Many people ask if I support him because he’s South Asian. My answer is no,” said Viswanath. “It’s because of his values. His politics transcend identity. He listens, he validates, he humanises. That’s what makes him not just a leader for this city, but for the world.”

Surbhi Gupta is the South Asia Editor at New Lines Magazine, based in New York City.