Why is the Indian far-right attacking New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani?

Middle East Eye

3 days ago

Zohran Mamdani's historic win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor shook up the political establishment.
A Democratic Socialist assembly member from Queens, Mamdani ran on a campaign pushing progressive policies such as a citywide rent freeze, taxpayer-funded childcare and "fast and free" public buses.
New Yorkers of all faiths rallied around the 33-year-old, and on 25 June he secured a stunning political upset, defeating his main rival, the political heavyweight Andrew Cuomo.
Despite being a relative unknown before the primary election, and polling as low as one percent in February, Mamdani's campaign mobilised a coalition of voters, including many from New York's 600,000 strong South Asian community.
But since his shock win, some within the Indian-American community have put a target on his back, making it abundantly clear they don't want, and will never vote for, a Muslim candidate.
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Last week, at a packed event in Queens, New York, a far-right Hindu activist pulled out the knives for the progressive candidate.
Kajal Shingala, also known as Kajal Hindusthani, a keynote speaker at the event, called Mamdani a "jihadi zombie" and said New York would become another Pakistan if he was elected mayor in November.
Listed as one the top 10 purveyors of hate speech in India, Shingala's social media accounts are rife with Islamophobic content, where she labels Muslim men as terrorists, rapists and "love jihadists" - a conspiracy theory that Muslim men are trapping Hindu women into marriage in order to convert them to Islam.
Her comments at the event, which were met by a round of applause from the hundreds of attendees - organised by the Gujarati Samaj and supported by a coalition of different Hindu groups such as the Vaishnav Temple of New York and the Brahman Samaj of New York - were a prelude for her to bring up the 2002 Gujarat riots which Mamdani described as a "mass slaughter" of Muslims at a mayoral forum.
India's current Prime Minister Narendra Modi was chief of minister of Gujarat at the time, leading to Mamdani calling him a "war criminal".
Modi was banned from entering the US for nearly a decade for failing "to control the persistent violation of rights of life, liberty, equality, and dignity of the people of the state".
Despite this, the Gujarati Samaj sought to cultivate strong ties with Modi, with its vice-president, Manikant Patel, saying back in 2012, while the ban was still in place, that he was in "constant contact" with Modi before he became Indian prime minister.
Lies and conspiracy theories
Shingala later said that electing Mamdani would mean that New York - supposedly like London under Mayor Sadiq Khan - would become another Pakistan and Hindu businesses would be under threat.
Since becoming mayor of London, Khan has faced a deluge of criticism from right-wing commentators, including Islamophobic abuse, despite the murder rate going down, an increase in public transport infrastructure and free meals for public primary school children.
Shingala spent most of her speech warning about the threat Muslims pose to the community and encouraged the attendees to learn self-defence to protect themselves from marauding Muslims, to boycott Muslim products, to protect their daughters from Muslim men who sought to lure and oppress them, and to produce more Hindu leaders to protect Indian and Hindu interests.
Sunita Viswanath, executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, told Middle East Eye that Shingala was using the event to extend her hateful rhetoric "from India to the US".
"It pains me that such extreme messages find platforms with mainstream cultural organisations like Gujarat Samaj," she said.
'The Hindu nationalist attacks on Mamdani are a predictable display of depraved bigotry'
- Audrey Truschke, Rutgers University-Newark
She added that recent Carnegie Institute data revealed that "the majority of Indian Americans - even Hindu Americans - do not support such hate. This is why opportunistic hate mongers like Kajal Hindustani have to huddle in closed door private events. We in Savera and Hindus for Human Rights will continue our work to unite across all our differences to fight hate together."
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who will run as an independent against Mamdani, was originally billed to be the guest of honour according to flyers advertising the event.
Without explanation, however, he pulled out of the event.
According to reports, he received a letter last Thursday signed by more than two dozen interfaith organisations asking him to withdraw and assert that such bigotry has no place in New York.
New York Focus reported that the president of the Gujarati Samaj, Harshad Patel, organised a fundraiser for Adams' re-election campaign at his home last week, which the mayor was supposed to attend.
Mamdani's deputy press secretary, Zachary Nosanchuk, told MEE that the "event is not on the mayor's public schedule, and he is not set to attend."
Neither the mayor's office nor the Gujarati Samaj would answer MEE's questions as to whether Adams attended the fundraiser at Patel's house.
String of attacks
Shingala's attacks were the latest in a string by Hindu nationalists who have weaponised his ethnic and religious identities to smear him.
The Ugandan-born state assemblyman and his family identify as Muslim, which has led to many accusing him of being a jihadi.
But it is his criticisms of Modi that seem to have incensed politicians on both sides of the political divide in India, who have derided him as anti-Indian.
Former actress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parliamentarian Kangana Ranaut - who has almost 3 million followers on X - shared a post on 25 June that falsely accused Mamdani of once leading "a mob of protestors in Times Squre calling Hindus as bastards and heaping abuses upon Lord Rama, who is worshipped by Hindus. A true scumbag."
Mamdani, in actual fact, was speaking out about the construction of the Ram temple on the site of the former 16th century Babri mosque in Uttar Pradesh, which was destroyed by far-right Hindu mobs in 1992, triggering Hindu-Muslim riots which led to the death of 2,000 people, mainly Muslim.
Ranaut's comment above the post she shared said: "He [Mamdani] sounds more Pakistani than Indian… whatever happened to his Hindu identity and now he is ready to wipe out Hinduism, wow!! It's the same story everywhere."
Across the political aisle, Indian parliamentarian Abhishek Singhvi, of the Indian National Congress party, also attacked Mamdani.
"When Zohran Mamdani opens his mouth, Pakistan's PR team takes the day off. India doesn't need enemies with 'allies' like him shouting fiction from New York," he wrote on X on 26 June to his 305,000 followers.
Although most of the vitriol against Mamdani originates from India, MEE has found that there are also a growing number of Indian-Americans - influenced by right-wing politics in India - who have sought to smear him.
During Mamdani's primary election campaign, a group called Indian Americans for Cuomo - who are based in New Jersey rather than New York - spent thousands on Cuomo's campaign.
They paid for a radio slot on an Indian radio station rubbishing Mamdani, as well as for a banner to fly over New York with the line: "Save NYC from Global Intifada. Reject Mamdani."
The group's authorised representative is Satyanarayana Dosapati, who has also organised a pro-Trump rally in Pennsylvania as well as being involved in pro-BJP politics in India.
New Yorkers won't be duped by the far right
Amid the attacks, scholars and analysts have differed over the impact the Hindu right wing poses to Mamdani's election ambitions.
Audrey Truschke, a history professor of modern India at Rutgers University-Newark, told MEE she doesn't think New Yorkers will be influenced by the "depraved bigotry" of right-wing Hindu forces.
"The Hindu nationalist attacks on Mamdani are a predictable display of depraved bigotry, especially anti-Muslim hate," she told MEE. "I doubt New Yorkers will be fooled by such execrable, anti-pluralistic sentiments."
She said: "I do hope the attacks [on Mamdani] serve as a wake-up call to the harms of far-right Hindutva ideology and groups who promote such intolerance in American society."
'If you are on the left of progressive politics, you get targeted'
- Manan Ahmed, Columbia University
David Ludden, emeritus professor of history at New York University, said the attacks on Mamdani by right-wing Hindus and pro-Israel factions were rooted in ethnonationalism.
"Claiming Mr Mamdani is anti-Hindu or anti-Indian has the same Islamophobia logic as claiming he is antisemitic or anti-Israel, and is equally far-fetched and baseless," he said.
"Ideologically, Hindutva and Zionism are both based on the populist claim that one ethno-religious group owns national territory, where it has exclusive rights to livelihood, wealth, and resources,' he added. 'Politically, Modi and Netanyahu regimes are allied against enemies they identify with Islam, whom they claim threaten national survival, to justify violence, expulsion, even genocide, in defence of the nation."
Ludden explained that both ideologies derive from early 20th century British imperial policies that carved the empire into national territories and made them fertile ground for "racist imperial ideologues, and for global Islamophobia today".
Trump backlash
Just like in India, support among Hindu nationalists for US President Donald Trump is strong.
The US president's right-wing politics, his stance on immigration and his denigration of Muslims have appealed to India's far-right, whose rhetoric is predicated on ethnonationalism.
During his first term, Trump ran on an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform. He controversely implemented a "Muslim ban" and in 2019 appeared at a mass rally in support of Modi in Houston where he told the 50,000 strong crowd that the Indian leader was "one of America's greatest, most devoted and most loyal friends".
Since Mamdani's primary win, Trump has repeatedly accused the Democratic Socialist of being a communist, with little to no push-back from the Democratic Party.
"The Democrats have crossed the line," Trump wrote on Truth Social after his primary win. "Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor. We've had Radical Leftists before, but this is getting a little ridiculous."
Later, during a dinner at the White House for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump reiterated to a reporter that Mamdani was a communist.
"I think he's going through a little bit of a honeymoon right now, but he might make it. But, you know, it all comes through the White House. He needs the money through the White House. He needs a lot. He's going to behave... He better behave. Otherwise, he's going to have big problems," Trump said.
"It's a philosophy [communism] this country is not ready for, and never will be," he added.
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Manan Ahmed, a professor of history at Columbia University said that amid the alliance between pro-Trump and Hindutva forces the attacks served what he called a global fascist movement.
"The Hindutva support for Trump, and Trump's focus on Zohran as a communist or as a socialist or as anti-Israel means that the Hindutva interest in Zoran goes up," he said.
As well as anti-leftist sentiment, he said there was a constellation of interests in which Mamdani's candidacy had became fertile ground for right-wing figures and groups - including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Hindu America Foundation (HAF), Trump and Modi - to advance their agenda such as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.
He said that BJP or Hindutva groups had a history of attacking prominent figures from the diaspora whose politics contrast with the divisive type of politics they are invested in, as a means to "shape the cultural conversation on both ends". He cited figures like the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who faced attacks by UK-based versions of BJP and Hindutva groups.
He pointed to similiar dynamics in the US where both former US vice-president Kamala Harris (who is half-Indian) and Seattle Assembly councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who spearheaded a resolution to ban caste discrimination in the city, have been subject to attacks. Sawant was also denied a visa to India earlier this year.
Ahmed added that the reason that support against Mamdani could be "operationalised so quickly" is because the Hindutva infrastructure in the US has been established for a while. "That's the reason someone in New Jersey can hire a plane to fly a banner," he added.
According to Ahmed, far-right ethnonationalists don't want a candidate who may challenge them
"If you are on the left of progressive politics, you get targeted," he said. "Obviously, if it is a Muslim subject, they have added language, but that language can be just as easily tailored if the person is not Muslim.
"That's why it's important to understand the relationship between the ADL and the Hindutva ecosystem. The ADL can target a Jewish person who takes an anti-zionist stance just as easily as the ADL can target a Palestinian or someone who's taking a stance for Gaza, even if they're not Jewish."
Punjabi and Sikh support
Fahd Ahmed, the executive director of community social justice organisation Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), told MEE that he didn't believe that Hindutva supporters will have much influence on electoral politics in New York due to the demographic make-up of the city.
He said the number of Indian Hindus who formed the working-class South Asian communities in New York City was "limited" and those who did exist were in neighbourhoods that are further out such as Flushing and Fresh Meadows.
Ahmed added it was important to distinguish between Indian Hindus - who were influenced by right-wing politics - and Hindus from other cultures who were not.
"We have lots of Hindu members who are from Guyana, Nepal, and even from Bangladesh," Ahmed said. "All of those people have been very deeply involved in supporting Zohran, doing work on the ground, knocking doors, making calls, talking to their neighbours, talking to their co-workers, and things like that."
'They have their own hesitations around Hindutva forces'
- Fahd Ahmed, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)
He said that Indian New Yorkers, who were largely Punjabi and Sikh, were also supportive of Mamdani.
"They have their own hesitations around Hindutva forces, coupled with Zohran himself being partially of Punjabi origin. He was involved in the taxi workers' strike, so the enthusiasm for him in that community where people know him is pretty high."
Ahmed added that young professional Indian Hindus who had moved to New York and were living in hip parts of Brooklyn or Manhattan were also supportive of Mamdani and had volunteered with Drum.
"They're not a very large number, but they turned out for the election at pretty high rates. I think it's fair to say that they turned out in support of Zohran."
Overall, he said Hindutva forces were largely present outside of New York City in New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester, which is why he hadn't seen much right-wing mobilisation for the primary election.
As we edge close to the November election, Ahmed said Mamdani's Muslim and Indian heritage, along with his strong pro‑Palestine positions and criticism of Hindu nationalism, rendered him an outlier in the race and a major target.
"Whether it's Zionist or Hindutva forces, they want to make sure that they're never critiqued," he said.
"Having somebody in office that is doing that is a threat to them."