NYC Meerl Race 2025: Decoding the politics of Indian -Mul Zoharan Mamdani – through his father’s books. world News

At the age of 33, Zoharan Mamdani has thought something. The Indian-Ugandan-American State Legislative Assembly is now a Democratic candidate for the Mayor of New York City, who has defeated experienced names like Brad Lander and even former Governor Andrew Kuoomo. They did it not with attractive hoardings or donor caches but with low-Fi metro videos, rentage, and a policy platform that combines tiktok aesthetics with trotskyite hardness. Free buses, high taxes for rich, a green new deal for New York, and an unrelated stance on Palestinian liberation.But in fact, to understand Zoharan Mamdani, you have to go beyond their press release and Instagram reels. His campaign lies deeply in a political world size by his father, Uganda -born scholar Mahmud Mamdani.If Meera Nair brought Kala, Mahmood argued.A huge figure in postcolonial scholarship, Mahmood is not your specific educational. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), grew up in Kampala, exiled during the rule of Idi Amin, and now located at Columbia University, he spent his life dissecting the violent architecture of the modern world. His work examines the political formation of colonialism, massacre, citizenship and identity.His writing does not flatter the West, nor does it offer easy moral binergies dominating cable news. Instead, it explains how the victims become criminals, how modern nation-states are made by making permanent minorities, and today’s global order is structured by violence and historic forgetting disease.Take When the victims become killersA chilling study of Rwanda massacre. Mahmud refused to reduce the massacre of ancient tribal hatred. Instead, he explains how the colonial powers had applied ethnic hierarchies that were then absorbed and were rebuilt by postcolonial regime. The massacre, in this scene, is not incompetent scary, but is a better result of state-building built on exclusion. It is a kind of systemic lens that appears in criticism of Zoharan of the apartheid of Israel. For him, this is not only a moral issue, but a structural and historical.In Civic and subjectMahmud explained how the colonial rule in Africa created a divided political identity. Urban citizens were ruled through civil law, while the rural population was administered through tribal customs. The result was a decentralized autocracy that was well alive beyond formal independence. This analysis is echoed to the understanding of Zoharan’s inequality in New York – a city is not only divided by income, but also how the power and policy is distributed between the neighborhood, between the gentrified enclaves and the neglected boro.Neither settling nor nativePerhaps Mahmud’s most provocative work presents the idea that settled colonialism and modern nation-state developed together. From North America to Israel, The creation of political prominions required simultaneous construction of political minorities. Mahmud argues that the violence of the nation-state is not in its failures, but in its many design. He indicates South Africa as an incomplete experiment, which is the vision of the post -nation political community. The idea makes the heart of Zoharan’s political style, belonging to a shared citizen rather than a certain ethnic identity-a coalition that includes immigrants, public housing tenants, youth activists and first generation voters.In good Muslim, bad MuslimMahmud knows how the US foreign policy of the Cold War-era promoted political Islam only to display it only after 9/11. He urges the readers to reject the simplified division between moderates and fundamentalists and instead examine the geopolitical scaffolding under rhetoric. This suspicion of Western moral posture appears in Zoharan’s foreign policy positions, especially when it challenges American military aid for Israel or monitoring of Muslim communities at home.Even From citizen to refugeeThe memoir of Mahmud’s expel to Uganda avoids the easy trap of martyrdom. He reflects how the colonial racial hierarchy shaped post -independence politics, and why Asians in Uganda were seen as foreigners even after generations of residence. The same story reflects to tokenist representation in the inconvenience of Zohran, refusing to romantic the romantic victim or flat identity. In his campaign, there is no identity message. There is solidarity.In Saviers and leftMahmud provides a criticism of human intervention in Darfur. He warns that military reactions in the name of saving life can obscure deep history and serve strategic interests. West, he writes, often projects his moral concerns over other conflicts without addressing structural reasons. The same doubt of the moral theater is seen in the criticism of Zoharan’s performing politics, where statements are made for applause rather than results.Across all his tasks, Mahmud returns to a fundamental idea. Words like native, settlement, citizen, refugee – they are not neutral. They are, applied and continuously manufactured by electrical systems. If they were made, they can also be precious. This idea is not only theoretical. This is the driving force behind Zoharan Mamdani’s campaign, which he calls home.His mayor may be in New York, but the ideas that fuel it come from Kampala, Kigali and Khartum. This is not just a son walking on his father’s footsteps. This is a continuity of a large intellectual project, now playing in the politics of the largest city of America.