With His NYC Rise, Zohran Mamdani Unmasks India’s Narrow Definition Of National Identity

-Analysis-

NEW DELHI — While a mayoral election in a city at the other end of the world may have little impact on Indian lives, the manner in which members of the Indian diaspora are viewed in India has always offered insights into the dominant imagination of India. Zohran Mamdani’s stunning Democratic primary victory in the New York City mayoral race, and the reactions to this in India brings up a question that remains perpetually at the heart of Indian political discourse: when we take away the legalities of citizenship, who is Indian and who gets to define what being Indian really means.

Narendra Modi on his many foreign trips has made interacting with the Hindu diaspora a core element of his foreign policy. In the framing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu diaspora is the only real Indian diaspora of relevance to India’s policy interests. The Muslim diaspora has been generally erased from the discourse while the Sikh diaspora has been actively demonised.

The media in the last decade has generally taken its cues from this. Members of the Hindu diaspora, including Rishi Sunak, Sundar Pichai or even Usha Vance all receive immense media attention in India, generally emphasising their connect to the country. But for Indian Muslims, giving up their legal citizenship seems to sever their cultural links to India in the Indian public imagination. Public figures in the US like Fareed Zakaria, Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Minhaj for example, all of whose parents were also born in India, are often described more generically as South Asian.

While the Modi years have no doubt sharpened these divisions, truly explaining this phenomenon requires us to explore the paradoxes inherent in the secularism envisaged by the pre-independence liberal elite in India.

For example, the 1931 Karachi resolution of the Indian National Congress, on which some of the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution were later modelled, provided for universal adult franchise, neutrality of the state with respect to all religions, freedom of religion and equality before the law. At the same time, culturally, a distinctively Hindu national image was also being shaped.

Sumathy Ramaswamy’s work tracing the visual evolution of Bharat Mata as a national deity provides interesting insights into this phenomenon. Despite a wide range of early figures drawing inspiration from other territorial representations in female form like Britannia, by the 1930s, a visual standard of Bharat Mata had emerged which closely resembled a Hindu goddess super-imposed on a cartographic map of India.

Hindus are seen as Indian both legally and culturally, while Muslims are treated as Indian only as a matter of legal right.

By the 1940s, some versions showed her carrying a trishul. This cultural imagery created the impression of a nation that was essentially and eternally Hindu. Many of the Congress’ strongest supporters of a secular state did not object to this framing, where the cultural representations of the country were kept essentially Hindu (and usually upper caste), while the country remained legally secular.

Predictably, this laid the groundwork for the post-colonial erasure of Muslim popular culture from the Indian public sphere, a process that has accelerated dramatically in the Narendra Modi years. From the demise of Muslim socials in Bollywood, to the renaming of towns and cities to erase their Mughal links, the dominant imagination of Indianness has become increasingly and exclusively Hindu.

Over the years, this has led to the hardening of a milieu, where even in the secular Indian discourse, Hindus are seen as Indian both legally and culturally, while Muslims are treated as Indian only as a matter of legal right. The ideological opposition to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism in recent years, for example, has also chosen to focus on the legal rights granted in the Indian Constitution to minorities, while sidestepping issues like the historical erasure of Mughal rule in India.

The corollary to this is a public discourse where a member of the diaspora who is no longer bound to India by the legal ties of citizenship can retain their cultural Indianness, if they are Hindu, but not if they are Muslim.

Whether the Indian media chooses to see Mamdani or any other member of the diaspora as Indian is of course generally irrelevant to the diaspora. However, this cultural debate of who is or isn’t Indian has far more critical implications domestically.

This sidelining of Indian Muslim culture from definitions of Indianness in the years since independence has meant that Indian Muslims, while in the technical possession of full legal equality are still forced to allow their cultural space in the national polity to be shaped by the Hindu majority.

These cultural definitions have spilled into the legal sphere.

For the liberal Hindu elite, Indian Muslims are often reduced to a peg, whose existence is a confirmation of the liberal self-identification of India as a secular state, and of a particularly ‘upper’ caste liberal belief in Hinduism as a uniquely tolerant faith (provided the Muslims in question shun the more visible markers of their own faith and repeatedly assert the primacy of their national identity over their religious one). For Hindu nationalists, Indian Muslims serve as a permanent threatening Other around whom their narratives of Hindu nationhood can be shaped. Any attempts by Indian Muslims to take control of their own identity and define their own role in the national polity outside these buckets has rarely been supported. It is particularly telling that some of the most charismatic young Muslim Indian voices of this generation remain jailed for their role in the Citizenship Amendment Act protests.

Indian Muslims have curiously also contributed to some of these Hindu framings of Indianness. In Mehboob Khan’s 1957 epic, Mother India, both Nargis’ character Radha (the titular Mother India), who functions as a metaphor for the values of the newly liberated Indian people and the village that serves as a metaphor for post-colonial India are visibly Hindu. In a career spanning four decades, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan has only played a Muslim character in a handful of films. One of these, the role of hockey coach Kabir Khan in the film Chak De! India does more to reinforce rather than challenge the idea that the Indianness of an Indian Muslim is ultimately determined in the eyes of his Hindu neighbours, and that for an Indian Muslim, acceptance in his own homeland is something that must be earned.

The separation between the cultural notions of Indianness and the legalities of citizenship has never been watertight. Often, these cultural definitions have spilled into the legal sphere. The December 1947 inter-dominion treaty on the recovery of abducted women, for example, provided that women abducted during partition and living with men of the other religion had to be brought back (if necessary against their own will) to their homes. The home in question for Hindu and Sikh women recovered in the areas that had become part of Pakistan was presumed to be India, even if many of them had never set foot there before and did not have families willing to receive them. India, despite its self-perception as a secular nation, also did not offer any choice to Muslim women found living with Hindu and Sikh men on this side of the border. They were recovered and repatriated, sometimes against their will, to Pakistan.

The enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, and the recent spate of arrests and deportations of Muslim migrant workers from West Bengal in Gujarat and Maharashtra, with police forces terming them Bangladeshi without any judicial process or oversight and pushing them across the border into Bangladesh, re-emphasises how quickly religious and cultural ideas of nationhood can override the legal guarantees of secular citizenship.

Zohran Mamdani, who describes himself as being of South Asian origin, has been difficult for the Indian public discourse to typecast. His mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, is a Hindu of Indian origin whose films are well known and critically lauded in India. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian honour, Nair’s 1988 Hindi film, Salaam Bombay was India’s official entry at the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Mamdani’s charismatic campaign advertisements, sprinkled with Bollywood flair, dialogue and music references, also strike the perfect media savvy chord.

Prior to the war in Gaza, Mamdani’s views on Israel alone would have barred him from the American political scene.

On the other hand, Mamdani’s outspokenness on Modi and the Babri Masjid and his general unwillingness to either recognise or operate within the narrow discursive boundaries that are set for Indian Muslims in secular spaces here has drawn liberal ire as well. It is particularly telling that Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a spokesperson for the avowedly secular Congress, instinctively framed his criticisms of Mamdani in language that has for generations been used to discipline Indian Muslims and other minorities who stray from the course – an accusation of serving Pakistani interests.

Without entering into the merits of Mamdani’s positions or candidature, it is important to acknowledge that his primary victory in New York City, less than 25 years after the Islamophobic hysteria that characterised the years that followed 9/11, offers some hope that political discourse can change, and change fairly quickly. Prior to the genocide in Gaza, for example, Mamdani’s views on Israel alone would have been a disqualifier from politics in America.

At the heart of it, Mamdani could not have won if he was not seen as an authentic New Yorker by the voters. However, instead of moulding himself strategically into a caricature of a traditional New York Democrat, Mamdani chose to use his political charisma to redefine the role in a manner that would play to his strengths – a gamble that seems to have paid off.

While India’s complex electoral systems, extreme inequality, caste-based voting and an increasingly authoritarian majoritarian state make a similar story almost impossible, Mamdani’s contribution to the Indian political discourse can be to allow us to understand that even identities that are sold as eternal and unchanging can evolve to become more inclusive with time, and that this evolution can best be led by the excluded themselves.