Roving Periscope: NY goes the London way—elects first Muslim Mayor!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: In September 2025, visiting US President Donald Trump personally asked officials that Pakistan-born London Mayor Sadiq Khan should not be invited to the state banquet hosted in his honour.
On Tuesday, he saw Indian-African-American leader Zohran Mamdani—seen as anti-Jewish, pro-Palestinian– being elected as New York’s first Muslim Mayor he had been campaigning against for months.
Predictably, Sadiq Khan promptly congratulated Mamdani on his election victory and his “historic campaign.” “New Yorkers faced a clear choice — between hope and fear,” Khan wrote on social media platform X, “and just like what we’ve seen in London — hope won.”
Recently, Trump had warned Europe against unchecked (Muslim) immigration and boasted that America had already taken steps to stop illegal influx.
Is the West reliving the Crusade’s era of Christian versus Muslims that supposedly closed some five centuries ago—before Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas?
Some pointers suggest so.
While they are wooing Muslim nations and leaders the world over, both Trump and his Vice President James David Vance have been promoting the Christian agenda at home. This week, Trump accused Nigeria of Christians’ ‘genocide’ and threatened military action, which the West African nation rejected. Also, Vance’s controversial statement that he wanted his Hindu wife Usha to convert to Christianity was seen as wooing the Christian voters for his potential bid to contest the 2028 presidential election.
A Democrat, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, 34, is son of acclaimed Oscar-nominated Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani, Ugandan academic and political commentator of Indian descent, who is a Professor at Columbia University. They raised Zohran in Uganda, South Africa and New York, before they moved to the US in 1999. Zohran became a US citizen only in 2018.
That’s why Trump’s Republican supporters are calling for Zohran’s denaturalization as a citizen. In fact, the pro-Jewish and Christian community in the US, the media reported on Wednesday, is concerned over the Muslims successfully weaponizing democracy and the constitution for election of a Muslim as New York Mayor, and its implications across America. Mamdani’s core support base among voters comes from South Asian and African immigrants.
Soon after his election, Mamdani roasted Trump: “Donald Trump, since I know you are watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
Trump was indeed watching, and took note. “AND SO IT BEGINS!” he wrote on his platform Truth Social just as Mamdani wrapped up his 30-minute speech.
In his fiery speech, Mamdani continued to attack Trump. “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city (New York) that gave rise to him. This is not only how we stop Trump. It’s how we stop the next one.”
Trump supporters pointed out two reasons for the Republican defeat: the US President was not on the ballot and the ongoing, almost a month-long shutdown of US administration, which forced thousands of employees out of jobs.
In a statement, US House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist, and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation. Zohran Mamdani’s election cements the Democrat Party’s transformation to a radical, big-government socialist party.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee Spokesperson, Mike Marinella, asserted that the Democrats ceded control to Mamdani, a “radical socialist,” and the far-left faction that would govern the party.
“They’ve proudly embraced defunding the police, abolishing ICE, taxing hard-working Americans to death, and replacing common sense with chaos. Every House Democrat is foolishly complicit in their party’s collapse, and voters will make them pay in 2026,” Marinella added.
At 34, Zohran Mamdani defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa. More than 2 million New Yorkers cast ballots in the contest, the largest turnout in a mayoral race in more than 50 years. Mamdani polled 50.4 percent of the votes cast.
Only a year ago, he was a New York state assemblyman, largely unknown outside his Queens district. On Tuesday, the democratic socialist pulled off one of the most astonishing political ascents in recent American history, defeating Cuomo twice in a year and securing a landslide victory in the general election over both Cuomo and Sliwa.
The former foreclosure prevention counsellor, housing activist and one-time rapper will now become New York’s first Muslim mayor, its first South Asian and first Africa-born leader, and its youngest mayor in more than a century.
When Mamdani announced his run in October 2024, most analysts dismissed him as a fringe candidate. Cuomo, hoping for a comeback after resigning as governor amid scandals, was expected to easily reclaim political relevance. Instead, Mamdani ran a relentless campaign centred on the spiralling cost of life in the country’s most expensive city. Before joining politics, Mamdani worked as a foreclosure prevention counsellor in Queens, helping families avoid eviction, an experience he credits with shaping his agenda.
Housing affordability became the heart of his platform: a rent freeze for tenants in stabilised apartments, new social housing, regulation of private landlords and city-run grocery stores to keep food prices down. He proposed free buses, universal childcare and a USD 30 minimum wage, funded by raising taxes on millionaires and corporations, the media reported.
His methods were as unconventional as his policies. Mamdani ran what many supporters describe as the first truly “digital-first” major campaign in New York history. His TikTok and Instagram videos — witty, multilingual and unmistakably rooted in the city’s street culture — made him a grassroots phenomenon. He coined terms like “halal-flation” while interviewing food-cart workers, jumped into the icy Coney Island waters in a full suit to dramatize his plan to “freeze” rents, and recorded viral videos in Spanish, Bangla and Urdu.
Mamdani leaned directly into his identity, refusing to soften his politics or background even as opponents tried to weaponize it. The son of Indian parents, born in Kampala (Uganda) and brought to New York at seven, he has long been vocal about immigrant rights and the discrimination faced by Muslim and South Asian communities.
Outside a Bronx mosque in October, he told supporters: “I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I’m proud to call my own … I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”
His positions on Israel and Palestine also made him one of the most polarising figures in the race. He described the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” and said Israel should exist “as a state with equal rights” for all rather than a “Jewish state.” Cuomo accused him of “fuelling antisemitism,” while business groups warned that his economic agenda would drive away corporations and high-earning residents.
Mamdani’s victory is more than a local upset. In a political climate shaped by Trump’s warnings of federal retaliation — including threats to deploy the National Guard or strip funding from New York — the election marks a defining moment for the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Trump called Mamdani a “Communist lunatic” and a “disaster waiting to happen,” while Mamdani said he would fight any attempt to “make life more difficult for New Yorkers.” “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him,” Mamdani told supporters.
“This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one.”
Now, the 34-year-old prepares to run a city with nearly 8.5 million people, a budget of USD 116 billion, a policing crisis, a housing affordability catastrophe and one of the most important economic profiles in the world. His critics say his policies are unrealistic; his supporters argue that nothing is more unrealistic than leaving New York unchanged.
In his victory speech, he put it simply: “I will wake up each morning with a singular purpose: To make this city better for you than it was the day before.
