In an Instagram video recently posted from his official account, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani appears on screen with his arms outstretched, leaning into an open embrace as he strikes what is familiar to Bollywood fans everywhere as the “SRK pose,” named after the industry’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan. In the video, in which he speaks entirely in Hindustani (the dialect mix of Hindi and Urdu), Mamdani uses Bollywood references and songs from the 1970s to lay out the contrast between his campaign — which centers around policies focused on affordability — and that of Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor whose bid is backed by powerful real estate interests and wealthy donors. Mamdani then goes on to employ plastic cups filled with mango lassi (a South Asian yogurt drink) as a tool to explain ranked choice voting during the upcoming Democratic Party mayoral primary election — a novel but effective way to reach out to South Asian American voters.
Unmistakably aimed at South Asian New Yorkers of a certain generation likely to be familiar with references from the ’70s, the video has managed to accomplish exactly what it set out to do — trend on desi WhatsApp groups and Instagram stories in (and outside) South Asian circles. Notably, the video also contained one of the few times that Mamdani has explicitly stated something he has largely resisted saying — that, if elected, he will be New York City’s first mayor of South Asian origin.
Cuomo had consistently been the front-runner in the race until recently, when, for the first time, a new poll conducted by Public Policy Polling for Democrat Justin Brannan’s city comptroller campaign showed Mamdani leading, at 35% compared to Cuomo’s 31%. Mamdani’s narrow lead has freshly energized his campaign, eliciting support from prominent South Asian celebrities like the Indian-origin actor Poorna Jaganathan and Pakistani-American singer Ali Sethi. This set the tone for the final debate on June 12, which underscored the contest as a two-person race between Mamdani and Cuomo.
Mamdani was born in Uganda to the popular Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair — whose movies include “Mississippi Masala” and “Monsoon Wedding” — and the Indian-origin Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani. Since October 2024, he has been running a campaign that does not aggressively invoke his identity, instead remaining laser-focused on issues of affordability and access, particularly for working-class New Yorkers. At his first major rally in Brooklyn in early May, Mamdani, who identifies as a democratic socialist, spoke extensively about policies like freezing the rent for rent-stabilized apartments, free buses and government-owned grocery stores, earning loud cheers from the audience, which included Black, Latino, white, Jewish, Muslim and South Asian New Yorkers.
While it received little mention during the event, Mamdani’s South Asian background was clearly evident. With the actor and Barack Obama administration official Kal Penn hosting the proceedings, Sikh and Muslim organizers sitting behind the speakers on stage, the Pakistani-American singer Sethi closing the show, and Bollywood and Punjabi tunes blasting out of the speakers before the event, Mamdani’s heritage loomed large.
Despite this, his outreach to South Asian Americans has its limitations. They have been among Mamdani’s primary anchors since his election to the New York state Assembly in 2020 as the member from Astoria, a Queens neighborhood where South Asians make up 41% of the Asian population. In 2021, Mamdani went on a hunger strike in solidarity with the city’s taxi workers and helped them successfully negotiate an increased debt relief under Mayor Bill de Blasio. According to a 2022 report by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, nearly one-third of the city’s cab drivers are South Asian.
Several South Asian organizers I met at the Brooklyn rally and elsewhere made reference to Mamdani’s advocacy for the taxi drivers — whose deaths by suicide, linked to predatory lending practices, were declared an “epidemic” by NYC Taxi Commissioner Meera Joshi in 2018 — as one of their key reasons for supporting him. Similarly, during the proposal phase of the Innovation QNS Project, which was set to bring a 3,200-unit, 12-building development to Astoria in 2022, Mamdani rallied with CAAAV Voice, an Asian-American working-class organization, to include 1,430 permanently affordable units in the project.
South Asians have been a focus of the Mamdani campaign since the beginning, especially during the month of Ramadan in March, when Mamdani, a practicing Muslim, attended several iftar events around the city and his website prominently featured Eid- and Ramadan-themed events for volunteers to canvass around. It was about that time that several media outlets, including The New York Times, began to publish stories wondering if the city’s 300,000 South Asian New Yorkers would be enough to usher Mamdani to a win.
The reality on the ground, however, is turning out to be quite different. Many South Asians I interviewed were fundamentally opposed to Mamdani’s positions on freezing rent and free buses across New York. The South Asian community in the United States is sharply divided, not only on the bases of nationality and ethnicity but also religion, class and, most specifically, caste. So it was no surprise that when I met South Asians across the city’s five boroughs over the last few weeks, their opinions differed as much as their circumstances.
Walking through Little Punjab in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens in early May, Mamdani’s name was virtually unknown. Business owners in the community — proprietors of fabric and tailoring shops, and wholesale household items stores typically found in Punjabi homes — had heard neither about Mamdani nor the mayoral election itself. The same went for the patrons and owners of Punjabi Dhaba, one of the oldest and most popular Punjabi-style eateries on the block, which has been featured in countless local stories and videos about the “delights of Little Punjab.”
Many residents and workers in the area, like Vipin Sarpanch, who owns a store on the same block, said they didn’t pay much attention to American politics and were more involved in political activities back home in India, where the state of Punjab has been a hotbed of farmers’ protests and drug-related deaths. Yet Richmond Hill was one of the New York City neighborhoods in which support for Donald Trump increased the most in 2024 — by 35%, according to The New York Times.
Another desi-majority neighborhood, Woodhaven, Queens, saw a 46% increase for Trump — and had similarly low levels of awareness about the mayoral race. A small business owner in Richmond Hill did not know of Mamdani, but when I told him about the candidate’s policy platform on affordability, he said that he did not want “beggars and stealers” to live in America, adding that people took unfair advantage of state policies like affordable housing and food stamps.
I also encountered skepticism about Mamdani’s rent freeze policy among middle- and higher-income South Asians. Many instantly bristled at the idea of Mamdani offering anything for “free” and feared that people who were unwilling to work would unfairly access benefits, even though most countries in South Asia have strong socialist policies in place.
One Sikh business owner and landlord said he had heard of Mamdani but strongly believed that rent needed to increase to match inflation and instead mentioned issues like local parking, garbage trucks, immigration and lack of timely police interventions as his top concerns. However, a report from the Rent Guidelines Board shows that the income for landlords in New York increased by 12% between 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile, inflation was at its peak at 9.1% in 2022. By March 2025, it had fallen to 2.4%
Only one 24-year-old Richmond Hill resident I met claimed to have heard of Mamdani through social media and said he would be “proud” if the candidate were elected mayor.
A super PAC representing landlords, the New York Apartment Association, recently committed to donating $2.5 million to Cuomo, making them the largest single donor to the former governor’s campaign so far.
The increasing right-wing affiliations among South Asian New Yorkers challenge the long-held image of the community as a reliably liberal, pro-Democratic voting bloc. Mamdani clearly understood this shift when he interviewed New Yorkers from the neighborhoods that saw the largest increase in vote share for Trump in the aftermath of the presidential election. Their reasons for voting for Trump included higher food prices, rising unaffordability and former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza.
That has not stopped Mamdani from canvassing in those same areas and courting voters who, just a few months ago, voted Republican. “It’s not so much that they’re becoming more conservative or more right-wing. People are frustrated with years of centrist policies that provide some lip service, but actually don’t produce any material change,” said Fahd Ahmed, director of DRUM Beats, an affiliate of DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), the largest and among the oldest organizations in New York focused on the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.
DRUM Beats recently endorsed Mamdani. The Democrats “talk about diversity, but we can’t afford to live in the city. It’s the right wing that has mobilized to provide an alternative — an ugly alternative, but at least providing an alternative,” he said.
I spoke to several DRUM Beats organizers who have been helping with the outreach for Mamdani’s campaign into neighborhoods with large concentrations of working-class Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalese, such as Kensington, Jackson Heights, Ozone Park and Midwood. Almost everyone talked about how these communities felt overlooked by the Democratic establishment.
Nabila, a youth organizer with DRUM Beats in Jackson Heights, said that right-wing politicians were also deeply embedded in these neighborhoods and reached out to people through events and photo ops at mosques, temples and gurdwaras (Sikh houses of worship). “They’re on the social media that our parents are on, like Facebook reels,” she said, adding that working-class communities get less support from the Democratic Party.
“I grew up working-class, we’re really struggling. Everything is just hard. I feel that really makes our folks vulnerable to being like, ‘I want something different, and here is this party that’s presenting something very different from what I’m used to seeing,’” she said.
Making inroads into community hubs like places of worship has always been the key to South Asian communities in the city, a detail that has not been lost on New York City politicians. Former Mayor de Blasio would routinely pose for photo ops with South Asian community leaders, even wearing a Sikh turban on one occasion. Mayor Eric Adams, who has made it a point to be seen with South Asian community leaders and acknowledge days of national importance to many of these communities, gave a press conference in January while getting his eyebrows threaded at a beauty parlor in Jackson Heights, a practice deeply rooted in desi beauty rituals. Even Cuomo, who had previously avoided public-facing events, took some time to visit gurdwaras in Richmond Hill and meet with Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Indian community leaders in Staten Island, based on his social media posts.
Yet many in the community believe that such photo ops serve the politicians and community leaders themselves rather than the people they claim to represent. “No campaign reaches out to our people,” said Kazi Fouzia, director of organizing with DRUM Beats, whom I met at the election outreach operation for Mamdani in Kensington, Brooklyn. “The politicians who run the election, they just go to the community event, talk with the gatekeeper. We call them ‘ethnic leader gatekeeper.’ And gatekeeper says, ‘Our community will go to you.’ Can one person say, ‘All [the] Bangladeshi community will vote [for] Cuomo in any election’?”
Other organizers I spoke with said that this kind of political visibility at events can sometimes leave a lasting impression for South Asian New Yorkers, given how closely it mirrors political outreach in their home countries. These leaders, who are mostly faith-based practitioners or successful business owners, have typically been in the country for several decades and play pivotal roles in the community as guides to American bureaucracy and systems for newer immigrants. They wield significant influence, especially when it comes to voting.
During the course of my reporting, several South Asian New Yorkers candidly said that they would vote the way the community leaders asked them to, especially as many said they didn’t have time to pay attention to individual candidates or felt too absorbed with the challenges of surviving in New York.
Some community leaders I spoke with even seemed upset that Mamdani had not reached out to them like other politicians. “There’s like a few gatekeeping uncles (almost always men) who are in some kind of transactional relationship with establishment politicians, but for the most part, are not actually engaging the breadth of the community and very often are not inclusive of women or young people or elders,” said Farihah Akhtar, a Bangladeshi New Yorker and the lead organizer of CAAAV Voice, which endorsed Mamdani in October 2024.
Mamdani’s team of 30,000 volunteers, who, according to the campaign, have knocked on over 890,000 doors since the start of this year (along with South Asian-focused organizations like DRUM Beats, CAAAV Voice and Muslim Democrats of City of New York) are attempting to move past the gatekeepers who have traditionally steered South Asian votes in New York, and it seems to be working.
During my reporting in Kensington and Midwood in Brooklyn, I met with dozens of immigrant Pakistani and Bangladeshi women who admitted to not being politically engaged in their home countries yet felt motivated to canvass for Mamdani. According to the 2023 NYC Communities of Interest report issued by the City University of New York (CUNY), Bangladeshis and Pakistanis have poverty rates of 22% and 21%, respectively — higher than the 19% rate citywide. Many believe Mamdani would be an effective mayor because he is a Muslim South Asian candidate who is “one of their own” and would intrinsically understand their issues, whether about immigration, affordability or solidarity with Palestine. Mamdani’s now-viral confrontation in March with Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border tsar,” over the detainment of the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was brought up by many of these women, who are currently experiencing a rise in fear within their communities, with many refusing to leave their homes due to a spate of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel.
Several South Asian New Yorkers, particularly those with Muslim backgrounds, mentioned Mamdani’s stance on Palestine, for which Cuomo attacked him repeatedly during the June 4 mayoral debate. Mamdani — who is among the few elected officials in New York City to describe the war in Gaza as a “genocide” and has backed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel — has been accused of “antisemitism” by several pro-Israel organizations and individuals. Even the debate moderators singled Mamdani out, asking if he would visit Israel and whether he believed in its right to exist as a Jewish state. Mamdani responded by saying he believed in “Israel’s right to exist as a state with equal rights,” which ruffled some feathers among sections of the city’s Muslim population.
Many also talked about seeing similarities with Mamdani, who, like them, is also an immigrant. Mamdani has spoken openly about the Islamophobic hate threats he has received since the start of his campaign, including a stunning call for his deportation by New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino. On the eve of the final debate, Mamdani accused a super PAC supporting Cuomo of playing into “racist tropes” for doctoring his image on a flyer to make his beard look thicker and darker. Fix the City, the super PAC, said it was a “rejected design” that was posted on social media. However, Mamdani and his supporters believed that Cuomo’s backers were leaning on his identity as a Muslim candidate to stoke fears among Jewish New Yorkers, with statements such as “Rejects Israel” and “Rejects Jewish Rights” printed next to the image.
South Asian organizations that have endorsed Mamdani maintain that it is his broader engagement with the community and his sustained commitment to issues they care about that earned him their support, particularly given the rising visibility of right-wing South Asian politicians in the Trump administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Vivek Ramaswamy.
While Mamdani’s identity might be a pull for many, Cuomo’s name recognition goes a long way among South Asian New Yorkers, especially in boroughs like Staten Island, where Mamdani’s volunteer outreach had yet to arrive when I visited in early June. Among Sri Lankan restaurant owners, like those in Richmond Hill, Mamdani’s name failed to elicit a response, but many offered their predictions about Cuomo’s win against Adams.
Other Sri Lankan New Yorkers who were more politically engaged were also more willing to overlook Cuomo’s corruption charges, sexual assault allegations and controversial handling of the COVID-19 crisis. “He was the only person who was there giving updates during COVID. He’s not a god; he can’t do everything. We need a strong person, who can fight with the government. Cuomo has no fear,” said one small business owner I met on the island, who declined to be named for fear of backlash.
However, even in Republican-majority Staten Island, organizations like Asian American Labor and Community Organization (AALCO) have endorsed Mamdani. “A lot of people are favoring Andrew Cuomo, but in South Asian communities more people [are] going towards [Mamdani],” said Afzal Ali Ansari, the executive director of AALCO and a district leader of the Democratic Committee of Richmond County. “Muslim voters say we’re going to help our brother.” There are over 14,600 South Asians in Staten Island.
Multiple endorsements notwithstanding, in almost every neighborhood I visited, I met South Asian New Yorkers who insisted that Mamdani needed to do more events and outreach to introduce himself to communities in areas where, due to sheer name recognition, Cuomo was ahead. Many in neighborhoods like Parkchester in the Bronx and Jackson Heights listed the rise in crime as their primary concern, a policy point that is not always front and center in the Mamdani campaign.
Whether Mamdani’s Muslim and South Asian identity successfully moves voters in New York remains to be seen. But it’s clear that his campaign is having an impact on desi communities across the U.S. and even in India, where “Mira Nair’s son’s campaign video” made national headlines. “Our community, both in New York City and across the country, is realizing that we have the power to swing elections for not just candidates from our community, but for any candidate,” said Chintan Patel, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based political organization Indian American Impact.
Patel seemed certain that the mayoral race in New York would influence South Asian electoral politics across the country, while maintaining that Mamdani’s success with South Asian New Yorkers was less a result of his identity than his singular ability to put in the work to build real relationships.
Mamdani has so far worn his South Asianness lightly and seems careful to not pigeonhole himself within a narrow identity. Yet his influence has already marked a shift within South Asian culture, both in New York and, arguably, across the country.
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