What New York's new mayor Zohran's really like

NEW YORK

- Ruchira Gupta, The Independent

Zohran Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji wave to the crowd at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, US.

(File/Reuters)

It was at a small family dinner that the then 28-year-old Zohran Mamdani told Ruchira Gupta that he wanted to go into electoral politics. Six years on, he has been elected mayor of New York City

I remember the first time Zohran Kwame Mamdani spoke seriously about entering electoral politics. It was 2019, and four of us were at dinner in Manhattan — his father, the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, along with a mutual friend, Zohran, and me. The restaurant was quiet enough to allow for a conversation without performance. He didn’t ask what it would take to run for the position of mayor in New York; he already knew the mechanics. What he wanted was ideas — what kind of politics New York needed, what principles should guide someone young and unconnected to big donors or political families—and to understand whether it was still possible for electoral politics to be rooted in ordinary people.

When I asked him the most obvious question— “Do you want help raising money?” —he thought for a moment before answering. “Not from one big donor,” he said. “From many people.” If he entered politics, he intended to build a base broad enough that no single donor could buy influence. It recalled Mahatma Gandhi's belief that the means are the ends in motion: you cannot build a democratic politics through plutocratic shortcuts and expect it to serve democracy on the other side. He worried that the Democratic Party had drifted away from ordinary people, that it had stopped standing alongside unions and started to court hedge-fund money. If he ran, he wanted to do it the other way round — door by door, block by block.