The clouds of a strange storm had gathered over New York City, USA. Many of the grandees of the city – the billionaires and deal makers, believed it was a storm that must not be allowed to break. They sponsored advertorials and Super-PACS to abort the danger. The owner of Trump Tower, and incumbent President of the United States of America, went so far as to threaten to withhold federal funding from New York if the dreaded possibility became reality.
On November 4, 2025, the storm broke, leaving an unaccustomed coalition of black people, Muslims, Jews, and an assortment of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, along with a band of youthful left-of-centre Americans giddy with delight.
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Ugandan-born Muslim man of Indian parentage, had won the election to be the next Mayor of New York. President Trump, an avid television viewer, must have been stewing in his chagrin as he watched the developing news from the White House.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. His father, Mahmoud, was born in Bombay in 1946 but was part of an Indian diaspora in East Africa. His own parents were Gujarati Muslims who were born in Tanganyika. Mahmoud moved his young family to Kampala. This was the Uganda of pre-Idi Amin rule, which was racially segregated, with rich Asians flaunting their wealth in a way that aroused resentment in native Ugandans.
The Mamdani family had a rich tradition of egalitarian activism. In 1963, Mahmoud was one of a group of Ugandan students who benefited from ‘Kennedy Airlift’ – a scholarship programme that brought African students to Universities in the USA.
He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Arts from University of Pittsburgh. While there, he participated in a students’ bus protest that took them south to Montgomery, Alabama, at about the same time as the Selma to Alabama Civil Rights marches.
He obtained a PhD in Law and Diplomacy from Harvard.
Mahmoud returned to Makerere University, Uganda in 1972, only to be expelled with other Asians by Idi Amin after the resentment boiled over.
He returned to Makerere after the deposition of Amin.
In 1996, Mahmoud became the inaugural AC Jordan Chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town.
He has since held other distinguished positions and is currently a Professor of Government, Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University, as well as Chancellor of Kampala International University.
Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is an Indian filmmaker who met her husband, her second, in Nairobi, Kenya, while working on a film. Zohran is their only child.
Zohran, in seeking political office, has felt no need to play down on his African roots, his Indian identity or his Muslim religion. He holds dual Ugandan and American citizenship. He has lived in New York from the age of seven years. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, and obtained a Bachelor’s degree with a major in African Studies.
He worked as a Housing Counsellor and Rap musician. He was inspired to volunteer to work in the campaign team of a local politician after learning he was supported by Heems, a New York Indian rapper and member of alternative hip hop group Das Racist.
He joined the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA), a left-wing group which, among other things, supported workers’ rights and the Palestinian cause. Running on a platform of housing reform, and police and prison changes, he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020 and re-elected in 2022 and 2024.
One year ago, he expressed interest in running for the office of Mayor of New York city. It seemed like a moonshot. His leftist politics were uncomfortable for the mainstream of a Democratic party that had just suffered electoral humiliation from Trump and his MAGA crowd.
Zoran campaigned on a platform of provision of free and faster intracity buses, universal childcare, construction of 200,000 new affordable housing units to meet the housing needs of the poor, legislation to compel landlords to keep rents stable, public safety reform, and a minimum wage of $30 by 2030.
He won the election, and will be sworn into office as Mayor of New York City on 1st January 2026.
His election has upset the establishment, Right and Left. He is the youngest Mayor of New York since 1892. His story resembles the London Mayor – Sadiq Khan, another Muslim Mayor of a major Western city, reviled by the Right Wing but with unassailable street-credentials. An immigrant, and a ‘Socialist’. Even his party, the Democrats, are not quite certain how to deal with him.
Donald Trump will do everything in his power to put Zohran down. His success would present an existential danger to the MAGA project.
How will it go for this young Socialist in the middle of a right-wing populist effort to remake America?
Zohran Mamdani is unfazed and unrepentant.
‘My friends…’ he said in his victory address, ‘we have toppled a political dynasty…If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him…This is not only how we stop Trump, it is how we stop the next one…New York will remain a city of immigrants…as of tonight, led by an immigrant…to get to any of us, you have to get through all of us…’
Brave words, setting the scene for a titanic battle.
Democratic thinkers are reviewing received wisdom that says the way back from the electoral shellacking they have suffered is to move away from the left and back to the centre. Mamdani is proudly left and uttering words that would have earned him public disgrace and ruination in the horror days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The people of New York are applauding.
It would seem, as Mark Twain wrote, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
