On Tuesday night at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount theatre, it could well have been Mamata Banerjee as the mayor-elect of the City of Skyscrapers.
Zohran Mamdani was elected New York City’s 111th mayor crushing the former governor Andrew M. Cuomo. Mamdani also is the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian Mayor, and, adding to the list of firsts, at 34 the youngest mayor in over a century.
He signals change.
Over a decade ago, a diminutive woman clad in a simple white saree and flip-flops stood tall against an ideology-driven regime and toppled it calling for poriborton.
The sound of the word was familiar. A couple of years before Mamata’s rise to the seat of power at the traditional Writers’ Buildings, the call for change by Barack Obama had resonated with the American voters.
Mamata too in the run-up to the 2011 Bengal Assembly polls called for poriborton, bodol – all meaning the same in her native language.
Since then Mamata has stuck with the tried and tested politics built on welfare economics, often derided by political rivals as freebies, sops and revri. The trick worked for Mamata in 2016 and 2021, the two successive Assembly elections where she romped home.
Ahead of his decision to contest for the mayor’s seat, Mamdani also did some chai pe charcha with political allies and labour leaders to discuss the possibility of a run, while he was campaigning for re-election to the New York House of Representatives.
Roti, kapda, makaan in New York
Little over a year ago, on October 23, 2024, Mamdani, a New York State representative, threw his hat into the mayoral ring, with the promise of “fast and free buses, free child care, and freezing the rent for rent-stabilised tenants” in around a million such apartments across the city.
“The biggest problem facing New York City is affordability. This is the most expensive city in the United States of America,” Mamdani had told Bloomberg in an interview. “It’s also the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And one in four New Yorkers in that same city are living in poverty.”
A Bloomberg report from September this year quoting the NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey estimates stated that around 65,000 households in the city earning between $100,000 and $300,000 annually were paying a third or more of their gross income to their landlords.
“That’s tens of thousands more than just four years ago,” the Bloomberg report stated.
Trendy neighbourhoods in New York like Manhattan’s Tribeca, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Long Island City in Queens had witnessed a dip in rent during the pandemic from five years ago. Rents skyrocketed as the city opened. Rent in New York City jumped by 27 per cent from 2020 to 2024, far above other US cities like Los Angeles, Boston and Washington DC.
A large chunk of Mamdani’s voters who helped him secure the mayoral primary in June this year came from these neighbourhoods.
Makaan (housing) taken care of, Mamdani focused on roti (food).
On 12 December last year, he announced his plan to build five city-owned grocery stores in each of the five boroughs in New York City: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island.
The grocery-store plan is the American equivalent of the public distribution system aka ration shops in India.
Instead of the rickety, ramshackle stores where Bengal’s urban and rural poor and lower middle class assembles on any given day of the week or month, New Yorkers are most likely to get clean interiors with rows of grocery and other household stuff in neat aisles.
“Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers,” Mamdani had written on his website. “They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighbourhoods on products and sourcing.”
In an interview Mamdani had said, “Everywhere I go, I hear New Yorkers talking about outrageous prices of groceries. This is a bold and workable plan.”
Four months after Mamdani announced his plans, two-thirds of New Yorkers supported the mayoral candidate’s proposal. A report by the Climate and Community Institute and Data for Progress in April this year said 85 per cent of New Yorkers complained about paying more for groceries in 2025 compared to the year before and 91 per cent were apprehensive about inflation hurting food prices.
“We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks,” Mamdani said in his victory speech on Tuesday delivered from the Brooklyn Paramount theatre to a million-plus crowd of voters, volunteers and supporters.
A similar scene played out one hot May afternoon at a single-storey house in south Calcutta’s Harish Chatterjee Street over 14 years ago.
The narrow lane which has for decades served as Mamata’s home and office was teeming with party leaders and supporters blocking both the ends of the stretch. The air was thick with loud cheers, slogans and green aabir.
Maa mati against big manush
There is also a similarity in how Mamata and Mamdani have postured their politics against the “big bad man” at the Centre (Delhi and DC, respectively)
“To get to any of us, you’ll have to go through all of us,” Mamdani warned Donald Trump, pledging that New York would remain “a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”
Just as Mamata has vowed to dethrone Prime Minister Narendra Modi if a “single genuine voter” in Bengal is disenfranchised in the special intensive revision of voter rolls under way in Bengal.
All that was left out from Mamdani’s campaign was the New York equivalent of Lakshmir Bhandar, the dole-for-women big-bang idea that every government from Maharashtra to Bihar seems to be latching onto.