05-07-2025
Uganda, India and beyond: What Zohran Mamdani's win reveals about the insecurities of expulsion
Zohran Mamdani's sensational defeat of the Democratic Party establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary election is reverberating in the US and globally. His win has revealed the weaknesses of the Democratic Party and the potential for a progressive-left alternative within the party.
Commentators largely view Mamdani as South Asian and Muslim, in line with contemporary US racial and religious identity formations. After October 7, 2023, and the ensuing US military-backed Israeli siege and genocide in Gaza, Mamdani was subject to virulent Islamophobia and xenophobic attacks for his criticism of the Biden-Harris administration's policies on Gaza.
He continues to be subject to intensifying accusations of anti-Semitism. given his support for Palestinian rights.
But Mamdani's political platform to make New York City an affordable city is not only shaped by democratic socialist principles connected to freedom struggles in the US like the Civil Rights Movement. Mamdani's class consciousness and identity is based on his Ugandan and Indian heritage and histories of anti-imperialist, racial and class struggle in Uganda.
This context sheds light on alternative South Asian diaspora politics, and a deeper critique of Democratic Party neoliberal identitarian politics. These critiques are possible without ceding power to the anti-diversity and supremacist machinations of right-wing politics in power today, from the US to Uganda to India.
Mass explusion
In Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025), I revisit the uneasy histories of the 1972 Asian expulsion – the mass expulsion of close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the Ugandan nation by military dictator Idi Amin.
Zohran Mamdani's mother is Indian film director, Mira Nair, and his father, Ugandan political scientist, Mahmood Mamdani. His father has detailed his expulsion in the memoir, From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain (1973). Zohran was born five years after his father returned to Uganda from exile, when the first Ugandan President, Milton Obote, returned to power after the fall of Amin, and, in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund, initiated property repossession and repatriation for Ugandan Asians in exile.
Obote would revoke Mamdani's citizenship again shortly thereafter due to his criticism of Ugandan governance.
Ugandan Asian repatriation was more successful post-1986 after Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement government led property repossession efforts. The current regime has focused on attracting Ugandan Asian and Indian investment, shifting from a politics of Indian expulsion and citizenship retraction to one of a politics of both Indian economic inclusion and racial exclusion.
Indian capitalist entrepreneurship has expanded since the early 2000s, encouraged by the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 and the export of the so-called Gujarat model to East Africa. Still, Ugandan state officials and legal instruments retain ideas of Ugandan citizenship that are based on Black African identity, African indigeneity and autochthony.
Ugandan Asian return and new Indian diasporic investment is based on a post-expulsion politics of racial non-reconciliation, and the expulsion remains unresolved.
Idi Amin had based his anti-Asian sentiments on three major post-independence concerns: the Indian community's economic and racial exploitation of Africans, the Indian community's lack of social integration with Africans, and the lack of inter-racial marriages between Indian and African communities, especially between Indian women and African men.
It is quite easy for us (especially of South Asian diasporic descent) to explain away these accusations as manipulations of fact, stereotypes, or as dictatorial propaganda. Yet I show that South Asian diasporic understandings of the expulsion trend towards racially paternalistic interpretations of Uganda, Idi Amin and Africans as exceptionally illiberal, and of Ugandan Asians as singular victims of Ugandan nativist politics.
Many continue to dismiss the contemporary resonances of Idi Amin's anti-Asian populist nationalism.
Racial consciousness
British rule and the social engineering of racial and class inequality between Indians and Africans was indeed reflected in the racial and class consciousness of the Ugandan Indian capitalist class: merchants and other entrepreneurs.
Racial consciousness – and ideas about the inherent civilisational superiority of Indians and the inherent inferiority of Black Africans – was also informed by religious and caste-based boundaries, patriarchal kinship relations and gender and sexuality norms. Together, they constructed the boundaries of racially and caste 'pure Indian' and 'impure African' communities.
These race-caste logics were sedimented within hierarchical labour-capital relationships and consolidated by apartheid-like legal arrangements and social segregation, leading to postcolonial racial tensions. One might return to this more complicated accounting of Indian elitist and racialist attitudes towards Black Africans – the idea that Ugandan Asians and the new Indian diaspora in East Africa have neither been easy victims, nor exclusively oppressors, in Africa.
I met Zohran Mamdani in Kampala in 2014, when I worked with his father in the African Asian Association, an organisation comprised of Asians of Ugandan heritage and other South Asians who identified with African-ness and Ugandan-ness and called Uganda their home. The association was working through concerns about the new Indian diasporic presence in the city – their lack of social integration with Africans, Indian paternalism towards Africans, and a possible repeat of 1972.
Zohran Mamdani attended one of the meetings of the AAA youth group and offered an astute analysis of renewed racialised class dynamics in Kampala. We discussed missed opportunities for egalitarian socialist policies in postcolonial Uganda, the rise of an Afro-Asian political class and internal class tensions within the Ugandan Asian and newcomer communities, including the rather proletarian and precarious migrants exploited by elites.
His analysis was based on his father's generation's understanding of East African experiments with socialism, Ugandan Indian class formation and racial precarity in Uganda. He also showed a capacity for internal community critique.
The 1972 Ugandan Asian expulsion is not as legible today in the US public sphere as it is in the UK and Canada, even though some Ugandan Asian exiles and descendants settled in the US. In Uganda, political elites appropriate commemorations of the 1972 Asian expulsion, typically with strategic and self-serving ambitions.
The Modi government engages the Indian diaspora in Africa in projects of Hindu nationalism and the religious hatred of Muslims and other religious minorities, despite histories of religious pluralism in East Africa.
British Indian politicians like Suella Braverman, Preeti Patel and Rishi Sunak, trace their origins to East Asian communities who fled East Africa. They have adopted understandings of their communities as entrepreneurial-citizens or even model minority citizens in meritorious competition or innate superiority with respect to the Black African diaspora and class-oppressed communities. Some, like Braverman, have even supported schemes to expel migrants and re-settle them to Rwanda.
We can find parallels to this mode of retrograde South Asian diaspora politics among the likes of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon or Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel (also of Ugandan Indian descent) who have allied themselves with the White Christian supremacist and anti-migrant demagoguery of the Trump MAGA regime. Idi Amin's Uganda, it seems, is not too far afield from us at all. Totalitarianism and its agents are Western and American, not only Ugandan or African. Coming full circle, the Trump administration has recently called for the denaturalisation of Zohran Mamdani's citizenship in the US.
Progressive politics
Zohran Mamdani's political imagination is a politics of South Asian diaspora that is not deracinated from its African roots. Africa teaches us about anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggle and the ways in which co-colonised South Asians might participate in solidarity with Black Africans and the African diaspora.
In contrast to a politics of a Ugandan Asian or South Asian diaspora that is about nostalgia; or racial victimisation and resentment; or dubious nationalisms, supremacies and hatred, Mamdani's generation offers us guidance for a progressive African Asian diasporic politics that is engaged with the global condition.
This politics disbands with representational identity and model minority politics and harnesses the power of uncomfortable histories and complicated identities to forge solidarities in context. However dislocated by historical process or birth circumstance, one can take principled actions against imperialist, capitalist, racist, casteist and patriarchal exploitation, and all forms of authoritarianism and fascism, both here and there, there and here.
His win is an offering for all those seeking guidance within the Democratic Party – but also for all of us from entangled South Asian and African diasporas.
