Joining The Chorus with a Wink

https://theprint.in/national-interest/zohran-mamdani-new-york-mayor-indian-socialism/2673153/ 

https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/zohran-mamdani-socialist-agenda-could-actually-spur-faster-growth-in-nyc-125062701427_1.html

Shekhar Gupta’s recent column on Zohran Mamdani reads like a man trying to play neutral referee in a rigged match—raising one eyebrow at the Sanghi mob baying for blood, while slyly tossing them a whistle and pretending not to notice. With the other, it slips the ideological brass knuckles to the crowd already frothing at the mouth. Mamdani, Gupta suggests, is a well-meaning radical caught in a swirl of impractical dreams. But scratch past the polish of editorial polite prose and one finds the familiar discomfort of India’s populists and the extended coterie

It’s not that Mamdani’s ideas are too radical—it’s that they are delivered from a platform that can’t be easily dismissed. A brown man, Muslim by heritage, representing a diverse district in New York City, who opposes Zionism, critiques Hindutva, and refuses to moderate his tone for polite company? That, to India’s pretentious liberal centre and right alike, is nothing short of scandal. Where BJP trolls hurl the usual epithets—jihadi, radical, outsider—Gupta employs a subtler strategy: paint Mamdani as politically naïve, doctrinaire, a man out of sync with the “realities” of governance. The problem is not just the tone—it’s the dishonesty embedded in the framing.

Nowhere in Gupta’s assessment is there serious engagement with Mamdani’s principled stances on Gaza, Trump-era xenophobia, or the systematic erosion of secular democracy in Modi’s India. These aren’t incidental details—they are central pillars of Mamdani’s politics. Yet instead of confronting them head-on, the column glides past them, choosing instead to obsess over rent control and the supposed recklessness of redistributive politics. This isn’t just intellectual laziness; it’s a strategic omission.

Consider the broader context. As Devangshu Datta aptly wrote in Business Standard, even capitalist cities depend—often invisibly—on the labour of those who earn too little to live within the systems they maintain. Drivers, janitors, nurses, and sanitation workers form the vital infrastructure of modern life. Squeeze them out with unaffordable housing and starvation wages, and the consequences follow quickly: rotting infrastructure, simmering anger, and eventually, urban flight. The rich leave not because the poor demand too much—but because the cities they plunder can no longer function.

This is the reality Mamdani’s politics engages with. Not abstract ideology but everyday crisis. His proposals—stronger tenant protections, public investment in transport and utilities, curbs on speculative real estate—aren’t relics of Marxist fantasy. They are policy-level interventions in cities breaking under the weight of inequality. Shekhar’s inability—or unwillingness—to engage with this pragmatic socialism betrays the true source of discomfort: Mamdani’s clarity.

Even more bizarre is Gupta’s attempt to link emigration from India to socialism. The “dunki” exodus, he implies, is a rejection of redistributionist fantasy. It’s a clever misdirection—and flatly wrong. The working poor don’t flee because they fear socialism; they flee because their lives have been rendered untenable by caste discrimination, failing agriculture, and communal violence. Meanwhile, India’s wealthy elite—those least likely to suffer under socialism—are also rushing to expatriate. They aren’t running from Marx but Stalin- they’re running from an increasingly authoritarian state where money no longer guarantees protection, only exposure. What’s being fled is not ideology but instability—a regime that cuddles capital one day and weaponizes enforcement agencies the next.

In contrast, Mamdani’s democratic socialism offers not utopia, but a course correction. A politics rooted in lived experience: in tenants who give up 70% of their income to landlords, in shuttered hospitals in working-class neighbourhoods, in billionaires lobbying to keep housing unaffordable. In short, a politics with eyes wide open.

And then, the final flourish: the postscript. A harmless-seeming anecdote about the Shahi Imam declining to meet / entertain Mira Nair—while praising Shekhar himself. On the surface, it’s trivial. But the subtext is unmistakable. The story operates as a veiled suggestion: that conservative Indian Muslims are too insular to embrace globally engaged Muslims like Mamdani. That Mamdani, with his Brooklyn swagger and foreign-left politics, would be alien in the mohallas of Delhi. It’s a sly erasure, delivered with a journalist’s wink. Not overt prejudice—just enough implication to seed doubt.

But here’s the thing: what truly rattles critics is not Mamdani’s rent policy or his progressive agenda. It’s his refusal to bend. He doesn’t apologize for opposing the Gaza genocide. He doesn’t dilute his disdain for Hindutva. And he doesn’t hide behind academic abstraction. He is clear, consistent, and combative. In today’s age—where spine has become an endangered species in politics—that alone makes him dangerous.

Prof Norman Finkelstein once said Kamala Harris failed because voters were tired of being offered more of the same. They wanted a chance to roll the dice. Trump didn’t deliver,  Mamdani is that next roll—a politics that doesn’t cower before big money, doesn’t posture as neutral while enabling the intolerant. It is, in the truest sense, radical only because the status quo is so corrupted.

If the radar of India’s ruling establishment even sniffs a threat—no matter how distant or imagined—it responds not with debate, but with a full-spectrum assault. A 360-degree barrage. First comes the online lynch mob, frothing at the mouth, hurling abuse like confetti at a party. Then the disinformation cavalry gallops in—half-truths, full lies, WhatsApp forwards masquerading as news. Television anchors, eager to serve, don their nationalist topis and bark on cue. And now, it seems, even the last redoubt of sanity—the editorial column—is being softened up for capture. One wonders what’s next. Perhaps morality itself, sold wholesale at the feet of the Great Leader.