As I watch from a great distance Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign for the mayoralty of New York, it is instructive to think about the similarities and differences between the electoral politics of that city and my own.
The differences are obvious.
The mayor of New York is directly elected by the whole city. The chief minister of Delhi is first elected to the city’s legislative assembly and, as with all parliamentary systems, has to command a majority in the legislature to secure his office.
The second obvious difference is the importance of inner-party democracy in electoral politics in the United States of America. We have just seen Andrew Cuomo and Mamdani face off in a Democratic Party primary to sort out which of them will be the party’s nominee in the general election for mayor scheduled later this year. It would be impossible in Delhi for an outsider to become the nominee of a major party such as the Indian National Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party because that nomination would be in the gift of the party leadership. The nominee would be anointed by the party machine, not elected.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that an upstart politician can’t gatecrash Delhi’s state elections. Arvind Kejriwal was precisely such an upstart when he first became Delhi’s chief minister more than a decade ago in 2013. It means that the outsider in question has to invent a new political vehicle first. Kejriwal did just that when he used the political capital he had accumulated via the India Against Corruption movement to set up the Aam Aadmi Party.
Comparing Kejriwal and Mamdani might seem arbitrary given the differences in their biographies. Mamdani is a migrant, he is affirmatively Muslim in a political context that marginalises Muslims and, at thirty-three, is something of a political prodigy. He served his political apprenticeship as a three-term member of the New York state assembly.
Kejriwal had a prior career in the civil services and had been one of the moving spirits behind the campaign for the Right to Information Act. It is reasonable to say that he used (and then sidelined) Anna Hazare to capture the public imagination. Kejriwal’s political calling card was his anti-corruption crusade for an ombudsman or Lokpal. It was aimed at the Congress which had dominated Delhi’s assembly politics for fifteen years. Sheila Dikshit had been Delhi’s chief minister through that period and Kejriwal successfully targeted the corruption in staging the Commonwealth Games to make the case for himself as the incorruptible new broom. Not for nothing is the electoral symbol of the AAP a jhadu.
Mamdani’s pitch to voters in the Democratic primary for mayor wasn’t framed around some grand struggle against political corruption. It was relentlessly focused on the cost-of-living crisis and his plans to alleviate it, such as free bus transport, free childcare, and a rent freeze for rent-stabilised apartments.
It would be a mistake, though, to make too much of this difference because in the AAP’s second campaign in 2015, the emphasis was on cheap electricity and free water up to a certain limit. In office, the AAP waived all electricity charges for households that consumed less than two hundred units of electricity. In 2019, it made bus rides on both air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned buses free for women. Throughout its time in office, it focused on improving Delhi’s public school system and promoting mohalla medical clinics. Like Mamdani, Kejriwal was determined to use public revenues to subsidise the lives of the working poor.
The other obvious similarity between the two is their ability to inspire and mobilise large numbers of normally politically inactive people to campaign for them. Mamdani’s genius for connecting with ordinary New Yorkers has become legend in less than six months of campaigning. His ability to inspire more than forty thousand volunteers to campaign for him, to knock on doors and make his campaign visible, allowed him to rout Cuomo’s massively funded but politically remote operation. His viral videos made him ubiquitous online and his real-life accessibility on the streets of New York made him instantly recognisable. For someone who had been a political unknown when he declared his candidacy in October 2024, Mamdani’s ability to command near-total public attention by the time he won the primary was unprecedented.
This was true of Kejriwal ten years ago. The passage of time has dimmed our memories of the David vs Goliath excitement that the AAP created when it took on the BJP in 2015. We forget the clever television commercials centred on Kejriwal, the remarkable street campaigning that nullified the BJP’s funding advantage, and the sense of excitement that Kejriwal created even amongst voters who had reservations about his political instincts. Also, over the last decade, Kejriwal, like all successful politicians, has had to govern and be judged by his record in government. He has had to cope with an implacably hostile Central government determined to undermine the AAP’s initiatives and policies.
Mamdani, if he does become mayor, will have to deal with his own party’s hostile establishment as well as Trump’s take-no-prisoners style of political combat. Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo’s father, once said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We don’t know if, ten years from now, Mamdani’s inspirational persona will survive the rigours of office. So what, if anything, is the difference between Mamdani now and Kejriwal ten years ago?
There is a difference. Two differences, if we are going to be specific. First, Kejriwal’s willingness to use issues and people and then shed them on his way to power spoke to an ideologically unanchored opportunism from the start. This is evident in his ability to moderate earlier commitments like the RTI while in office, his willingness to consort with figures from the majoritarian Right during the Anna Hazare phase of his public career, and his clever use of Hazare’s authoritarian moralism to build himself up. We have no way of predicting the compromises or Faustian compacts that Mamdani might make in office but his categorical commitment to economic issues and the language of class leave him less room for manoeuvre.
The second difference is existential. Kejriwal is a Hindu politician in a political landscape dominated by Hindu majoritarianism. In the last ten years, we have seen the AAP flirt with Hindutva, use an overtly Hindu idiom in retail politics (affirming Hanuman to match the BJP’s use of Ram and so on), and cynically abandon Muslims in northeast Delhi in the wake of the communal riots in late February 2020. This, despite the massive electoral support that the AAP received from Muslim voters in Delhi in the assembly elections earlier that very month.
Kejriwal’s protean populism is committed to whatever works, it is shapeshifting almost by definition.
Mamdani is a Muslim in a political culture broadly inhospitable to politicians who happen to be Muslim. We have seen that this leaves him open to allegations of Islamism and anti-Semitism (especially in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel) from mainstream politicians and the mainstream media. The fact that he has been open about his faith and his concern for Palestinians in Gaza, while running a campaign strictly defined by the goal of lowering the cost of living for working New Yorkers in America’s most expensive city, is principled in a way that Kejriwal’s slippery populism, free to backslide into a majoritarian hinterland, never was. Kejriwal’s political choices make him an interesting retail politician; Mamdani’s choices have the potential of making his project a precedent for Democratic politics.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com