Ruchira Gupta | Mamdani’s NY Race Offers Some Democracy Lessons

I first shared dinner with Zohran Mamdani in 2019. He was tutoring kids to pay rent, counselling tenants squeezed by predatory landlords, and rapping at open-mics after midnight. Between bites, he said if ordinary people were trusted and organised, they could transform New York City.

Six years later, the 33-year-old son of Ugandan-Indian immigrants is the Democratic nominee for mayor. His rise proves that conviction wasn’t a throwaway line, but a method.

I write as a New Yorker, an NYU professor, and an US-Indian author whose books begin in India and end in Queens. Queens is the most linguistically diverse place on earth: 138 languages ricochet through its streets, and you can sample five cuisines in a single block. Yet behind that abundance lurk eviction notices, hate crimes, and subway delays that eat whole pay cheques. I have watched neighbours retreat behind mosque walls or whisper across caste lines in grocery queues. That is the New York Mamdani was born in: vibrant, yes, but fractured, anxious, unaffordable.

Yet he refused to polarise. He had multiple jobs, lived in streets where neighbours fear ICE raids, and turned that anxiety into a forward-looking vision. His politics isn’t built on fear; it’s built on belonging.

Mamdani, Muslim by birth and secular by temperament, campaigned arm-in-arm with Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive from Brooklyn. He condemned Israeli bombardments of Gaza and Narendra Modi’s persecution of Muslims, while inviting Jewish and Hindu volunteers to canvas the same blocks. The message wasn’t “set your identity aside” but “bring it, and let’s compare rent receipts.” Affordability was the shared grammar through which 138 languages could argue and still cooperate.

India should pay attention. Our cities too are fractured: by caste, religion, and class. Mamdani shows that issues woven into daily life win races. He made democracy feel tangible, like something you could hold in your hand.

What struck me in 2019 was how little he resembled the archetype of “the leader”. Zohran was 27, passionate, and wrestling with the same uncertainties many young people face: rent, employment, identity. Yet he didn’t perform politics; he practised it. He showed up, knocked doors, earned trust by earning a living -- rooted, reachable, real.

He listened more than he spoke, scribbling notes on the Q66 bus and lingering on stoops to ask tenants what kept them up at night. Those humble, horizontal conversations, sometimes in halting Hindi, Urdu, Bangla or Spanish, became the campaign. There was no spectacle, just steady relationship-building.

The operation was horizontal by design. Long before a glossy flyer appeared, thousands of micro-meetings knitted strangers together, rewoven the social fabric, and transformed apathy into agency. Some volunteers were taxi drivers who drafted poems between shifts; others were retired nurses who never voted in a primary. The means were the end.

Out of that process emerged three dignity guarantees: childcare that doesn’t bankrupt families; a commute that doesn’t devour wages or time; good groceries in state stores and housing that feels like shelter, not shackles. To pay for it he proposed a modest two-per cent levy on fortunes over $50 million and aligning corporate taxes with New Jersey.

Because the programme arose from shared experience, no one had to be bribed to believe it. Volunteers, many of them my students, many immigrants, knocked on over a million doors. They relied on neighbourly trust, not paid ads or algorithmic targeting. No flashy consultants, no poll-tested slogans. Many had never canvassed before. They followed him as he wasn’t a star.

Social media didn’t win it; it amplified a ground game rooted in face-to-face relationships. In an age obsessed with likes and clicks, Mamdani’s rise reminds us that algorithms can’t replace trust.

Critics warned donors would flee. Yet even many wealthy New Yorkers backed him because his critique ran along class lines without caricaturing “the rich”. Charts showed how a thin tax tweak could fund universal after-school care.

Equally instructive was his choice to stay inside the Democratic Party. It is tempting to bolt for the purity of third-party banners. Mamdani chose the slower, messier route of internal insurgency -- rank-and-file membership drives, platform fights at 11 pm -- and bent the machine until it nominated him. The lesson for reformers, in India or anywhere: boring procedural stamina often beats spectacular exits.

Now comes November. Eric Adams, rebranding as an independent defender of “law and order,” still commands the bully pulpit. Andrew Cuomo is testing the waters, and Curtis Sliwa stalks Fox News studios warning of “Marxist mayhem”. Wall Street super-PACs are sharpening attack ads faster than chefs chop onions in Jackson Heights. Victory is not assured. But what cannot be erased is the durable network of block captains who discovered power by using it.

That discovery resonates far beyond the East River. Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru are racing toward the same cliff of unaffordability that pushed Queens families to desperation. Indian parties grow richer and more paranoid, erecting social-media fortresses instead of door-to-door relationships. We chant “Save democracy!” but for millions who have never tasted it, the slogan rings hollow.

Democracy must be felt before it can be defended. Mamdani offers a case study in fighting authoritarianism not with louder slogans, but by making democracy irresistible in daily life. By listening, organising, and redistributing power -- not symbols --he shows how fear can be met with collective joy.

I have seen the effect. Queens tenants who once dreaded ICE now knock on strangers’ doors to explain rent stabilisation. Bengali grandmothers debate childcare ratios with Colombian baristas. A young Sikh volunteer tells me canvassing helped him understand why his grandfather’s inhaler costs three subway rides.

None of that was orchestrated from a stage; it unfolded across living-room rugs and hallway lights where turmeric mingles with strong coffee. Mamdani didn’t ask Queens to transcend identity; he asked it to translate identity into common cause. Queens hasn’t elected a new political machine; it has assembled a choir that can improvise on the stoop. Its power lies not in spectacle but in repetition -- the quiet, stubborn insistence that neighbours deserve one another’s attention and care.

He reminded immigrants why they came: not just to escape something, but to build something that cannot be built alone. Inspiration, he proved, is not a soft virtue but a hard strategy—it recruits, retains, multiplies.

If that can happen in a borough where 138 languages jostle for airtime, it can happen in India’s cacophony. Door knocks, listening circles, volunteer spreadsheets, late-night dosa dinners -- these are democracy. Practice them daily and, as Queens did, we may discover hope feels downright ordinary.

And in this exhausted century, ordinary may be the most revolutionary thing of all.

Ruchira Gupta is the author of The Freedom Seeker & I Kick and I Fly, founder of NGO Apne Aap and a professor at NYU. Follow her on insta: RuchiraAGupta