Tuesday, December 23, 2025

INDIA

Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan And Caste Of Ideologies

The Left needs to shrug its Left-Brahmin configuration to emerge with newer forms of solidarity.

Ajay Gudavarthy
18 December 2025

OUTLOOK, INDIA

Marx Archive, 2018: Artwork by K. M. Madhusudhanan Photo: | Courtesy: Vadehra Art Gallery

Summary of this article

The Indian Left is in decline, increasingly seen as elite-driven (“Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan”) and out of sync with fragmented, pragmatic political behaviour shaped by neoliberalism.

It has failed to adapt to a new political idiom where culture, affect, symbolism and everyday experience shape politics—spaces the Right has successfully occupied.

To revive, the Left must shed elitism, reconnect class politics with culture and lived anxieties, rebuild unity, and create inclusive, popular forms of solidarity and organisation.

Left politics, for some time now, has been witnessing a terminal decline. There is a growing concern in university spaces that Left politics may end up attracting only the social elite, and those they are attempting to mobilise may move to the Right. It is a new political configuration that I refer to as Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan. The imagination of the Left has, over a period, been getting eroded in terms of its appeal and jouissance. Those who it was mobilising seem to be operating on a different register. It is a conflict between idealism and pragmatism, ideology and strategy, structural change and immediate survival. But what has changed so fundamentally?

What has changed fundamentally is the way transformation is being imagined after the neoliberal era. Farmer movements in the recent past have been a great exception in bringing back street protests in a big way. Farmer protests succeeded in pushing back the farm laws, but they did not succeed in electorally defeating the current political regime. It is in this context, some may argue, that farmers protested against the farm laws and not for the political defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They may protest at Delhi’s borders, but may go back to voting for the BJP and Narendra Modi. Defeating the entire corporate model of development was never their intention; it was only about saving their land.

Why should the farmers defeat the political regime? This question does not make sense in Left-oriented politics. It is part of a structural logic, but some in today’s context may argue as to why burden the farmers with a regime change? Is it the logic of politics or the burden of morality? If farmers pushed back the farm laws, but went back to voting for the BJP for other considerations, how should one analyse such a thing? Some may argue in the current neoliberal context that expecting a continuity or consistency in the political behaviour or subjectivity is itself never empirically true. One should allow seeing that political action and choices are fragments and remain essentially fragmented.

The same political subjectivity can be framed in a different Left lexicon that fragmented behaviour is itself the product and symptom of neoliberal times. Should politics then not be about bringing a sense of a semblance of connection between the fragments? Or is it more liberating to think of change as disorderly, discontinuous and piece-meal? The later kind of a change imposes no moral burden on the political subject, while the aim and imagination of large change is burdensome and also totalitarian in character. This is the central question and challenge that the Left politics are facing in current times. Its old ways are not working and the new ways are not acceptable to it

The other major shift in Indian politics is that its idiom has changed. With representation becoming a significant dimension of social justice, there is a new local cultural idiom that has entered politics. There is a great shift to cultural symbolism and also making sense of economic and material issues through a cultural idiom. The BJP has been at the forefront of appropriating this phenomenon and the Left has not yet joined the party. It is still constrained by its social-ideological frameworks that lack affective depth. Revolutionary language brought in great symbolism of songs, dance, and slogans. They are now jaded and sound repetitive. The Left is often prone to confusing being repetitive with commitment. One could be tempted to compare it with the (Brahmin) Bhajan culture. It can be best understood by an anecdote when I took the initiative to arrange for a condolence meeting of a Left ideologue, and his comrades paid him rich tributes by saying that what he said in the 1950s, he said the same (or stood by the same) till 2000, when he passed away!

The Left certainly needs to reinvent itself. Both the parliamentary and non-parliamentary Left are on the wane. The decline becomes even more stark when you see that both the Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) began in 1925, and the opposite directions in which they seem to have travelled. With the coming of Gen Z, the Left begins to look even more archaic, even though it’s the Left student politics that continue to remain successful.

This is where the Left needs to link the questions of capital and exploitation to culture and more so everyday existential issues. The market and neoliberalism are not only an economic phenomenon, but also a cultural phenomenon. It impacts the way we think and interact. Is loneliness not the gift of late capitalism and distorted modernity? Anxiety is the product of excessive competitive ethic, and intrusive markets at the root of anomie. The Left fights the markets without linking it to anomie, and fights competition and monopoly without linking them to anxiety. It fights spatial inequalities without fighting boredom. One need not go too far, but take a detour to stop at Bollywood when it sings Khali bore do paharo se… jhola uthakar chale..Ramachandra ji (Fed up of these empty, boring afternoons, I’m packing my bag and leaving). Boredom has emerged as such a potent issue that populist authoritarians have reduced politics to entertainment. People are looking for new stories to celebrate life, and workers and peasants too possess mobiles. Entertainment and compensatory consumption have collapsed to be one. How can the Left enter and encroach such spaces? Mostly, the Left assumes all of culture to be conservative, and mistakes performance for manipulation.

The Left needs to move back into popular registers where everything that is popular is not necessarily progressive. But in order to recover the progressive one cannot eschew the popular. It is now clear that the progressive has to be built from within the popular by resignifying myths, mythologies, folklore and civilisational stories. Revolutionary poet Varavara Rao from Telangana was known for his robust interpretation of Karna for the caste question and Draupadi for the gender. With the emergence of independent Ambedkarite movements, mythologies were seen as casteist and they gradually receded from public discourse.

The rise of populism is questioning politics as a professional and a specialised field. It is bringing the everyday into the political. This is in itself radical. The intimate is bursting the opaqueness of the political as a distant and an indifferent field of discourses and policies. The Left got bamboozled with the intimate in the political. It needs to begin experimenting with a new organisational culture that is friendly, affable and above all, provides a deep sense of belonging. They need a new culture to settle differences without splits. They don’t need to learn from the RSS, but could well begin with Lenin’s ideas on concentric circles. While the RSS floats a great number of ‘shadow armies’, the Left is unable to hold on to corporeal bodies.

It is time for the Left to rethink the possibilities of a merger between various factions that have microscopic differences given disproportionate significance. They may need to open a fresh dialogue between the parliamentary and non-parliamentary factions. The ‘Great Debate’ is no longer as relevant as it once was. Neither China nor Russia has remained socialist. We need to make a fresh beginning in telling ourselves that we do not know how to build socialism. Bertrand Russell was among the first to return disappointed with his trip to the erstwhile Soviet Union and early to point to its bureaucratic culture and the absence of creative freedom. The Left needs to read and listen beyond its coterie sometimes to see what looked obvious to many.

Social elitism works in many ways in the Indian context. It is in this sense that the Left needs to shrug its Left-Brahmin configuration to emerge with newer forms of solidarity. As long as it fails to do so, it will, figuratively, remain an organisation of ‘Brahmin boys’.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ajay Gudavarthy is with the centre for political studies Jawaharlal Nehru University

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/

This article appeared as Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan in Outlook’s December 21, 2025, issue as 'What's Left of the Left' which explores how the Left finds itself at an interesting and challenging crossroad now the Left needs to adapt.

INDIA

Left’s Caste Blind Spot: Ambedkar And His Criticism of The Circle Of 'Brahmin Boys'

Dalit thinkers argue that caste as a dimension of social oppression was sidelined in communist practice. Intellectuals within the communist fold acknowledge that this neglect may be central to the crisis the Left faces today

N.K. Bhoopesh
Updated on: 11 December 2025

OUTLOOK, INDIA

The Icon: A young boy sells portraits of Ambedkar | Photo: Imago/Hindustan Times

Summary of this article

Ambedkar accused communists of ignoring caste while CPI sought to dilute his influence.

Critics say Savarna-led Left long sidelined caste, pushing class over social oppression.

Late representational shifts expose ideological limits that haunt the modern Left.

Bhimrao Babasaheb Ambedkar never minced words.

For him, the Indian communist leadership was a circle of “Brahmin boys”, unable or unwilling to grasp the daily violence of caste. The communists, in turn, accused Ambedkar of siding with imperial interests and holding back the so-called untouchable masses from the wider democratic struggle.

The clash sharpened in 1952. After leading the Independent Labour Party (ILP), Ambedkar founded the Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF), shifting focus to specifically champion Dalit rights as a national political force, evolving from the ILP’s broader labour and anti-caste work into a platform dedicated solely to Scheduled Caste interests. The ILP was Ambedkar’s first political vehicle to address general labour rights and anti-caste issues. The SCF was formed to secure a distinct political platform to secure the rights of the Dalits.

Soon after, the Communist Party of India’s (CPI) central committee passed a resolution urging cadres to break Ambedkar’s influence among Dalits by taking up their demands and leading the fight against caste-Hindu oppression through common mass organisations. The resolution stated: “The party must sharply expose the policies of Ambedkar and wean the SCF masses away from his influence by boldly championing the democratic demands of the Scheduled Caste masses, by fighting caste-Hindu oppression against them and by drawing them into common mass organisations.”

Rooted in a classical Marxist framework, Indian communists largely saw caste as a secondary contradiction, something that would ultimately be resolved and subsumed within the broader context of class struggle. Yet, despite ideologically relegating caste to a lesser plane, it continues to haunt the Indian communist movement, especially after the Mandal era, which changed the Indian political landscape without recognition.

Related Content

Minimum Marxism: Reclaiming Class Politics

A Century of Red: The Indian Communist Movement

The Right In The Left: Lessons And Limits

Why The Left Matters: A Century of Struggle, Social Justice And The Road Ahead

Constitutional expert and former director of the National Law School of India, Mohan Gopal, argues that the Indian communist leadership’s longstanding discomfort with the anti-caste movement is rooted in its Savarna social orientation. To illustrate this, he cites Left ideologue EMS Namboodiripad. When Namboodiripad was invited to inaugurate a programme at Shivagiri on the birth anniversary of social reformer Sri Narayana Guru, he declined. Gopal notes that EMS reportedly justified his refusal by saying that if he had attended, he would have been expected to acknowledge Guru’s historical contributions, “which he did not like”.

Caste Is Poison, And Ambedkar Is The Antidote
BY Musafir Baitha

For Gopal, this episode captures a deeper pattern: a reluctance within sections of the communist leadership to recognise, let alone celebrate, the transformative role of anti-caste reformers. In his view, this reflects not merely ideological differences but a structural inability on the part of a Savarna-dominated leadership to engage fully with the politics of caste emancipation. The Indian Communist Party leadership’s caste elite domination has been pointed out by many as its inability to confront caste as a social reality.

“Caste was never brought as a subject that merits discussion within our organisation,” says O.K. Santhosh, professor at the University of Madras. Santhosh was a Students’ Federation of India (SFI) leader, a senate member, and a college union chairman in his college days. “In our committees, we used to discuss about liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and a whole lot of things. But never caste issues. I don’t think it is deliberate. But growing up, I found the party’s approach inadequate to explain social realities and moved towards Ambedkarite movements,” he said.

C.K. Janu, a firebrand tribal leader, began her public life through the CPIM-led agricultural workers’ front, the Kerala Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU). She says the party and its leaders were impervious to the demands arising from the systemic issues tribals faced, such as landlessness and marginalisation. “Whenever I tried to present the case of the tribes, their problems and the ill-treatment meted out by the people who owned large swathes of land, it was given a short shrift. We were forced to form a tribal association—the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha—because of the Left’s approach towards the tribals. They used us only for political processions and to stick posters,” she said.

A CPI(M) sympathiser, who did not wish to be identified, pointed to an interview given by former general secretary, the late Sitaram Yechury, to illustrate what he sees as the Left’s deeper ideological blind spot on caste. In that interview, Yechury recalled an exchange with the late Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram. Kanshi Ram had asked him a seemingly simple question: How many Dalits are there in the West Bengal CPI(M) cabinet? Yechury admitted that he did not know and promised to check.

The sympathiser highlighted that even a close associate of Yechury—a CPI(M) minister—did not know the social background of his own colleague. Within the party culture, he said, “to be innocent of caste was regarded as a sign of ideological purity.” What is often celebrated as caste-blindness, he argued, is not an individual failing but a structural limitation of the Left’s ideological framework, which discourages acknowledging caste as a political reality even when it shapes access to power.

In 1989, when the VP Singh government announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, the Left’s vote share was at its highest, with the CPI (M) at 6.55 per cent and the CPI at 2.57 per cent. But the political decision that catapulted parties with a social justice agenda also sidelined the Left. Except in 2004, when the Left was instrumental in propping up the United Progressive Alliance government, its role has waned since then. Dalit thinkers argue that the cultural and identity-centred dimensions of social oppression, especially caste, were systematically sidelined in communist practice, even as anti-caste movements outside the Left dramatically reshaped India’s social landscape.

Interestingly, even intellectuals within the communist fold now acknowledge that this neglect may be central to the crisis the Left faces today. “The caste background of the earlier leaders could be one reason for not taking the caste issue seriously,” says Saira Shah Halim, author of Comrades and Comebacks. She notes that communist parties failed to recognise caste as a primary structure of oppression and instead relied almost exclusively on economic explanations. “They pushed the base-superstructure theory, believing that once the economic structure was corrected, every other social problem, including caste oppression, would disappear. That approach is deeply flawed,” she adds.

The Communist Party’s approach to identity politics is reflected starkly in the social composition of its leadership. For 58 years after its formation in 1964, the CPI(M) did not have a single Dalit member in its Politburo. It was only at the 2022 Party Congress that Ramachandra Dome, a Dalit leader from West Bengal, was inducted into the party’s highest decision-making body. The 2025 Congress added another leader from a marginalised community, Jitendra Chowdhury, a tribal leader from Tripura. The CPI, India’s oldest communist party, now has a Dalit general secretary in D. Raja, marking a late but notable shift in representational politics.

Engaging with caste has remained a persistent fault line in Indian politics, with Ambedkar on one side and nearly every other political formation, each in its own way, on the other. The communist approach, and its limitations, appear more pronounced because the Left explicitly claims a revolutionary mandate to abolish all classes. This makes its difficulty in fully grappling with caste even more glaring.

The question of how social markers such as caste and gender fit into the Left’s overarching class narrative is therefore unlikely to fade. In all likelihood, the Left will continue to animate political and intellectual debates, perhaps until both caste and class hierarchies are dismantled.

N.K. Bhoopesh is an assistant editor, reporting on South India with a focus on politics, developmental challenges, and stories rooted in social justice

In South Andamans District, Crocodiles Crawl Out After Floods

Leesha K Nair | 23 Dec 2025

Climate-driven flooding and changing creek systems are bringing saltwater crocodiles into closer contact with people across South Andaman.

Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar: As the heavy rains that battered South Andaman district in late September eased slightly, Navin Halder (35) set out one morning to fetch coconuts. His routine required him to cross the Guptapara Fish Landing Centre (FLC), a designated site where fishing boats unload and auction their catch, located about 25 kilometres from Port Blair, to reach a patch of land flanked by two creeks.

Along with a coworker, Navin usually plucked coconuts in the early hours and carried them on their backs to the market. But that morning, the presence of an unexpected visitor stretched their work until noon.

“We didn’t notice the crocodile at first,” Navin told 101Reporters. “I was plucking coconuts with my bamboo stick and my coworker was collecting the fallen ones. We know there are crocodiles in the creek, but they never came up, so we hardly looked around. While he was picking the coconuts, I saw the crocodile close to him and asked him to move away fast. We had no idea they could climb up to such heights.”

Navin lives in Guptapara, a village in the district. Like many creekside settlements across the islands, Guptapara has been witnessing more frequent crocodile sightings in recent years, sometimes far beyond the waterways where the animals were once largely confined.

Crocodiles, Conservation and Conflict

Saltwater crocodiles are apex predators, capable of taking down almost anything in their path. But there was a time when they were prey too. Until the mid-1900s, Andaman’s saltwater crocodiles, known as “salties”, were hunted extensively for their skin and eggs, or killed as pests, pushing the population close to extinction.

Their numbers began to recover after they were granted legal protection under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. Restrictions on mangrove cutting introduced in the 1980s further helped restore estuarine habitats critical to crocodile survival. Today, forest department estimates and conservation studies put the crocodile population in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at around 400-500.

While officials describe this as a conservation success, residents living along creeks say they are increasingly bearing its costs.

“We used to fish in neck-deep waters earlier, but now we are afraid to enter even knee-deep water,” said V Karuppuswamy (40), a fisherman at the Guptapara fish landing centre. “A crocodile once came right next to my boat at night. It takes dogs straight from the jetty. This wasn’t seen earlier. We have been seeing this more over the last ten years.”

Similar accounts are common in Guptapara. Residents said crocodiles are now appearing in smaller streams and in areas where they were rarely seen earlier, moving beyond the main creeks and closer to jetties, fields and homes.

“Crocodiles were not present in all these streams earlier,” said Navin Halder. “Over the last eight to ten years, they have been seen more. They come to eat the leftover bait thrown near the jetty. Once they come up, they stay. Two or three years ago, one even came behind my house.”

Many residents attribute the increase in sightings to food waste entering the creeks. Fishermen said discarded bait and fish waste attract crocodiles, but argued that this has only intensified an already existing problem.

“If waste is being dumped in the creeks, everyone does it,” said Kumud Ranjan Saojal, a resident of Guptapara. “Why blame only fishermen? Earlier there were fewer people here. Now there are more people dumping meat waste into the creeks, so the crocodile will obviously come.”

Residents acknowledge that waste plays a role, but say it intersects with deeper ecological and demographic shifts.

Some fishermen also allege that crocodiles captured near settlements are released into the open sea rather than kept in captivity, from where they eventually swim back. According to them, such animals, accustomed to human-associated food sources, return repeatedly to areas close to settlements.

Forest Officials Reject Claims

“Whenever a crocodile is captured, it is kept at the Chidiyatapu Biological Park,” said Sanjay Kumar Sinha, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests. “We are currently feeding around 80 crocodiles there. Even if crocodiles had been released into the sea in the past, incidents would be concentrated in one area. Instead, sightings are spread out. We also have records of crocodile attacks dating back to the early 2000s, it is not a new issue.”

According to Sinha, official records show 22 crocodile attack incidents since 2002. “Earlier, there used to be three to four attacks annually. In fact, attacks have reduced over the last two to three years. There has been no incident in the past three years. Awareness has increased, warning signboards have been installed, and we are capturing more crocodiles. This year alone, I have issued 25 capture orders, and 13 crocodiles have already been caught,” he said.

Meera Oommen, a trustee of the Dakshin Foundation and the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, said waste disposal near creeks is one of several factors driving human-crocodile conflict in the Andamans. She pointed to the species’ natural behaviour as another key reason for their expanding presence.

Saltwater crocodiles are highly territorial, she explained. Large males often force smaller individuals to disperse in search of new or vacant territories, while females become particularly aggressive during the nesting period. This territorial pressure, combined with changes in the landscape, pushes crocodiles into areas where they were previously uncommon.
“Organic waste disposal needs to be controlled near creeks and mangroves,” Oommen said. “Islanders did dump waste this way earlier too, but crocodile numbers were much lower, and the scale of dumping was limited because there were fewer locals and tourists.”

She added that crocodile movement becomes easier during periods of heavy rainfall and flash floods, when larger areas are inundated. “During such times, they can stray into locations close to human settlements. Nutrient-rich areas such as the mouths of creeks and streams, where fish and other prey congregate, also become particularly attractive.”

When Waters Rise

Shifting rainfall patterns have further amplified this movement. Heavier spells of rain cause creek systems to overflow, temporarily linking smaller streams, drains and even flooded village roads. These conditions allow crocodiles to access areas they could not reach earlier.
Flash floods triggered by erratic monsoons and cyclones can also displace crocodiles from their usual habitats, pushing them towards calmer waters closer to settlements. As creeks spill over their banks, the physical boundaries between waterways and villages blur, increasing the likelihood of encounters with people.
A 2024 study found that the highest number of human-crocodile conflict incidents and sightings were recorded during the wet season, between June and December, with nearly half of the encounters occurring at creeks. The study documented a sharp rise in sightings—from just three in 2015 to 23 in 2016—an eightfold increase within a year. Since then, sightings have remained consistently in double digits. Manglutan nallah recorded the highest number of sightings in South Andaman, with the Guptapara nallah ranking fourth.

Official records, however, present a more limited picture of harm. Government data shows eight crocodile attacks across the Andaman and Nicobar Islands between 2020 and 2025, only two of them in South Andaman and none reported from Guptapara. Livestock losses are also low on record, with three cattle attacks documented across the islands, two of them in South Andaman.

Ground surveys conducted between 2020 and 2023 suggest a wider gap between official records and lived experience. Researchers documented several attacks that went unreported. By 2023, six attacks had been recorded across the Middle and South Andaman region, four of them concentrated in the Guptapara–Manglutan stretch alone.

“I stopped fishing in 1999,” said Kumud Ranjan Saojal (63), a fisherman-turned-shopkeeper in Guptapara. “But when I used to fish, neither were crocodiles seen here nor did the area flood. Now, both happen together.”

Residents say changes in rainfall patterns over the years have reshaped life in the islands. In South Andaman district, overall rainfall increased by about 20% between 2020 and 2024, despite year-to-year fluctuations. In 2025, the southwest monsoon arrived earlier than usual over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The India Meteorological Department recorded rainfall at over 104% of the Long Period Average for the country, with the monsoon core zone receiving more than 106% of its average rainfall.

Climate models warn that such shifts are likely to intensify. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report flagged small islands as especially vulnerable to flash floods caused by erratic rainfall and stronger cyclones. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands fall within India’s very high cyclone damage risk zone, with wind speeds of up to 55 metres per second. Cyclone occurrences in the region have increased in recent years, nearly doubling from around five annually in 2020. A 2015 study had already identified Guptapara as highly vulnerable to flooding due to cyclonic storm surges.
As climate unpredictability worsens, villagers say they are grappling with two overlapping threats: rising waters and rising crocodile encounters. Local leaders believe that reviving a long-abandoned water project could help manage both.

A Long-Delayed Dam

Construction of the Guptapara Nallah Dam began in 1992-93 as an alternative to the islands’ primary water source, the Dhanikhari Dam. The project was later stalled due to technological limitations. Over the years, silt and gravel accumulated in the stream, reducing its depth and capacity.

“The stream needs to be desilted…only then can the water level be controlled,” said Prakash Adhikari, Adhyaksh of the Zilla Parishad, South Andaman. “A crocodile was even captured at the Guptapara junction during flooding. They are now regularly seen near the playground close to the police station. It is during floods that crocodiles come up. If the dam is completed, water can be regulated and even stored for the summer. The recent floods happened because of neglect.”

The administration accepted Adhikari’s plea, and the Andaman Public Works Department (APWD) has since revived the proposal.

“This dam has the potential to work as a good reservoir,” said T.K. Prijith Rekh, Chief Engineer of APWD. “If built in such a catchment area, water can be released in a controlled manner during heavy rains. We are waiting for paperwork and the memorandum of understanding to be finalised, after which work can begin. Even though desilting is not formally part of our mandate, we will carry it out.”

Flash floods have not been limited to South Andaman. In recent months, visuals from Diglipur, Swaraj Dweep (Havelock) and Car Nicobar have circulated widely on social media. Rekh attributed these floods to a combination of erratic rainfall, cyclones and unplanned construction near creeks. He cited Mannarghat village, close to the crocodile-frequented Wright Myo Creek, as a recent example.

Coexistence

“Coexistence is the only way forward,” said Sanjay Kumar Sinha, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests. “We face immense pressure from the Centre. In February, I issued a killing order—the first in the islands—and was questioned extensively. There was strong insistence on capturing rather than killing the animal. The best approach is to respect the crocodile, understand its behaviour and remain alert.”

At Kumud’s shop, fishermen often gather to wait out the rain. Their conversations drift between expiring fishing licences, thoughts of leaving the profession altogether, and reports of yet another crocodile sighting nearby.

“In the Andamans,” Kumud said with a laugh, offering paan, “the life of a crocodile has value, not the life of humans.”

While men are statistically more likely to be victims of crocodile attacks, women in affected families continue to live with the fear that lingers long after an incident.

“Before the attack, my father used to fish morning and night,” said a woman whose family member survived a crocodile attack several years ago. “Now he is bedridden. Earlier, everyone in the village went fishing. After his leg was injured, I don’t let my sons or husband go. One man in the house is already confined to the bed—what if it happens again? I stay home more now because the others have to go out to earn.”

Others say they have learned to adapt.

“The crocodile stays in the creek; we stay on higher ground,” said Mohamaya Saojal (59). “Earlier, around 2017 or 2018, there was a lot of fear. Now, after living with this for so many years, we have become used to it. It doesn’t affect us as much anymore.”

Leesha K Nair is a freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.

Argentina: 2 Years of Milei’s Austerity & Alignment to Washington

Pablo Meriguet | 23 Dec 2025

In this article, we review some of the general trends and attitudes of Javier Milei’s government two years into his term.

Argentina President Javier Milei. Photo: Javier Milei / X

Thousands of Argentines endured high temperatures as they took to the streets on December 18 to protest the labor reform of Javier Milei’s far-right government. The call to action by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was supported by several trade unions, which claimed that the measure seeks to destroy workers’ rights to benefit big business: “This reform will only deepen poverty, social exclusion, and job insecurity. We will not give up our fight for decent work,” the CGT said in a statement.

The government has justified the measure by citing an alleged need to modernize labor relations: “The text also incorporates specific incentives for the formalization of employment, new rules for the platform economy, more efficient employer contribution schemes, and mechanisms that reduce litigation, providing the system with greater predictability and long-term stability.”

However, organized workers claim that this is a labor flexibility project that aligns with President Milei’s neoliberal agenda. Cristian Jerónimo, leader of the CTE, said: “[The labor reform] does nothing to benefit the world of work; it is written in favor of Argentina’s large corporations and does not favor small and medium-sized enterprises.”

But for the protesters, this reform comes as no surprise. Long before becoming president, Milei announced that it was imperative to reform the entire structure of the Argentine state in order to put it on the “path to freedom,” which means neoliberalizing the economy, reducing state participation in the economy to a minimum, strengthening the apparatus of repression, and aligning the South American country geopolitically with Washington’s interests. In short, to return to the path of the Washington Consensus.

After the day of mass mobilization, the government announced that the debate on the reform would be postponed until February, an initial sign that Milei is feeling the pressure of the popular demonstrations. Yet, after two years in office, Milei has done everything possible to push forward his neoliberal agenda even amid many rounds of mass demonstrations. A series of laws, executive decrees, and international diplomatic engagements have been the clearest signs of the path taken by the right-wing libertarian leader who governs a country that, despite his promises, is once again returning to the path of economic crisis and political instability.

Economy: fiscal adjustment and social tension

In line with neoliberal orthodoxy, Milei has implemented a series of fiscal adjustments to eliminate the deficit, even though this has been at the expense of the material stability of the most disadvantaged sectors, who have taken to the streets to protest against cuts in health, education, and other areas that the Argentine state now refuses to cover in full or adjust in line with the current economic reality. Students, teachers, researchers, and university workers have also taken to the streets consistently, demanding improvements in higher education funding, funding for science and health research, and defending free and public education.

Repression of mass protests, ordered by Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, has been severe. Hundreds have been arrested and injured, including Pablo Grillo, a journalist who was nearly killed when a tear gas canister struck him in the head.

Nevertheless, Milei did not slow down. The elimination of subsidies, wage freezes, and widespread privatization of public companies generated the long-awaited fiscal surplus in more than a decade. Year-on-year inflation, which stood at around 211% at the end of 2023, was reduced to 3% at some point in 2025.

Despite this, several analysts have stated that the 2.3% increase in inflation in October 2025 reflects the shortcomings of a neoliberal model in sustaining a long-term surplus.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that this year, Donald Trump’s administration bailed out Argentina with a record payment of more than USD 20 billion, in addition to the IMF’s generous granting of USD 20 billion to Argentina.

In other words, the surplus that the executive branch promotes as its great economic success has been achieved thanks to enormous support from its international allies, who demand neoliberal macroeconomic change not only in Argentina but throughout the region. This, of course, comes at a price that Argentines will have to pay for decades to come. Argentina has the largest IMF debt in the world. Its debt of more than USD 64 billion is “the price of freedom.”

Politics: reduction of the state and open confrontation

Following his economic model, Milei’s government has pushed radical downsizing. More than 10 ministries and 200 government departments were eliminated in one fell swoop. This meant the dismissal of almost 50,000 people who suddenly found themselves thrown into unemployment and precarity.

These decisions were made abruptly and aggressively, political attitudes that the president has adopted as part of his communication strategy. Bypassing parliamentary approval whenever possible, Milei always sought to govern unilaterally whenever possible.

But Milei has also achieved significant legislative victories. At the beginning of his administration, he had the support of only 39 deputies and six senators; however, he managed to pass several laws, such as the Bases Law (which allowed for the radical privatization of the Argentine state) and tax reforms.

He achieved this thanks to the support of the PRO, a right-wing party led by former president Mauricio Macri, and certain dissident Peronists. The formation of the so-called “May Pact,” a major agreement between Argentina’s right-wing parties and governors, allowed him to negotiate and agree on several reforms desired by right-wing libertarianism.

This pact prevented an increase in pensions for the elderly, who have regularly protested to demand more money to buy medicine and food, which are now major obstacles in their lives. Despite this, the Pact has not budged and continues with its neoliberal drift.

Political and judicial scandals

Milei’s administration has also been marked by several scandals. Very early on, he began a dispute with Victoria Villarruel, his vice president, whom he accused of playing into the hands of his political enemies.

He was also involved in the “$LIBRA” scandal, in which he is accused of being part of an international fraud scheme related to the sale of cryptocurrencies. A parliamentary commission concluded that Milei did use his position as president to promote the scam, which caused millions in losses to investors around the world.

But the event that probably had the greatest impact on Milei’s popularity involved his sister. Karina Milei, who serves as Secretary to the President, is accused of participating in a bribery ring that operated through the National Disability Agency (ANDIS). Many saw the emergence of this scandal as the reason for his resounding defeat in the Buenos Aires Province elections on October 26.

Despite this, Milei managed to recover and his party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), won the next legislative elections and increased its number of seats in the legislature. His strategy was the usual one: accusing Peronism of destroying Argentina and presenting himself as the only one capable of saving the country. However, this messianic communication strategy has begun to be questioned precisely because of the corruption and fraud scandals that have plagued his government.

Alignment with Washington

Milei has made a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy. Argentina’s vote against the UN resolution condemning the US economic and trade blockade of Cuba reflects an important change. Historically, Argentina has maintained a diplomatic position against any act of imperialism due to its claim over the Malvinas Islands, which, despite being off its coast, are governed by the United Kingdom. The dispute has escalated to military levels despite repeated claims by the Argentine authorities.

But the change is much more than nominal. Argentina has become the Trump administration’s greatest ally in South America. Milei has praised Trump’s personality, and Trump has publicly supported him, like when, in the last legislative elections, he suggested an end to cooperation between Buenos Aires and Washington if Milei lost. In response, the Argentine president has repeatedly declared his loyalty to Trump’s geopolitical project and has supported all of his initiatives both within and outside the region.

In this way, Milei has become a sort of archetype for the leaders of the new Latin American right. With radical fiscal adjustment at the expense of the most impoverished sectors, open confrontation with their opponents, and an international policy fully aligned with Washington (which has initiated a new chapter of the Monroe Doctrine), far-right governments are beginning to gain ground in the region: Kast in Chile, Paz in Bolivia, etc., are examples of an ideological and geopolitical shift in the region that is impossible to understand without the figure of Javier Milei.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch

Mamdani For the Masses or the Masses For Mamdani?

Ganesh Trichur | 23 Dec 2025

The future of American politics struggles to be rewritten in the aftermath of Mamdani’s stunning victory. For, the party to which he belongs is far from forging a vision adequate to the challenges ahead.

New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Image credit: @ZohranKMamdani on X

A sea change of major proportions took place in the political system of the United States when Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblymember from Queens borough and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated not only his formidable rival, the former Democrat Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, but also the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in the November 2025 general elections.

Mamdani’s decisive victory, with over 50% of the votes cast makes him New York’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor of a city of 8.5 million. As Nathan Gusdorf, the Director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, observes, he may well be ‘the most important American socialist to ever hold executive office’. Mamdani isn’t however the first socialist mayor of New York City, nor is he the first to be endorsed by the DSA.

The DSA in 1989 endorsed David Dinkins who became New York’s first African American socialist mayor (1990-1993), in the wake of the great but short-lived political momentum built up by Jesse Jackson’s famous 1988 Rainbow coalition. But the DSA that endorsed Dinkins in the 1990s also supported Israel; it was only in the second decade of the 21st Century that the DSA became an outspoken critic of Israel and denounced it as an apartheid and racist state.

Mamdani is also a strong critic of the racial state of Israel, in a way Dinkins never was. There is, moreover, a qualitative difference in the times to which the two socialist mayors belong. David Dinkins served as mayor when the Soviet Union was collapsing, when the US was celebrating its unipolar geopolitical moment, and when establishment liberals like American political scientist Francis Fukuyama were declaring ‘the end of history’.

Mamdani’s tenure, by contrast, unfolds at a time when US world hegemony is finished; Russia has resurged as a Great Power; and a majority of Americans (those within the Republican Party included) are not only critical of Israeli humanitarian crimes committed in Gaza; they are also questioning the unconditional financial and military support that the US offers Israel. A formidable legitimacy crisis confronts US power and prestige on world-scale, worsened by Trump’s tariff wars on Europe and Asia and his blatant disregard for norms of international law.

Inside the nation, creeping inflation fuels a profound cost of living crisis while violent raids on immigrant neighbourhoods spread fear and anxiety among the labouring masses. Within this conjuncture, Mamdani’s anti-racist politics combines well with his affordability agenda to strike a powerful chord with the working-class majority in the city and in the nation.

WORLD-HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MAMDANI’S POLITICAL VICTORY

To explain the phenomenal political victory of Zohran Mamdani – first in the June primary and again in the November 2025 general elections – to understand how and why a South Asian socialist secured a mandate from over a million voters, it is best to begin by noting that the city in which the masses elected him to be their mayor, is a city of violent extremes.

Those who visit New York for the first time are dazzled instantly by its tremendous vitality. It is a city that never sleeps – thanks to its fleet of taxi drivers and a subway system that remains accessible through the night. The city’s aura of restless, inexhaustible energy is powered by dreams of upward mobility. These dreams make New York’s working class stretch itself beyond the limits of the working day, working late into the night. The wealthy in the city also work hard, to transform the enormous productive surplus generated by the city’s workers into astronomical profits, much of which concentrates in the towering superstructures of lower Manhattan.

As the epicentre of world-spanning financial networks that converge on Wall Street, New York is home to billionaires who celebrate capitalist ‘creative destruction’ as their destiny, which they identify with that of the city. Alongside its glittering skyscrapers, world-class universities, and first-rate public libraries, New York is also home to an artistic and cultural avant-garde who frequent its majestic museums and vibrant theatres. The city’s green spaces and public parks are urban oases in the hot summer, places to recuperate vital life lost in endless work; and its innumerable bars and high-class restaurants serve global cuisine that charms travelers.

The Statute of Liberty, the global symbol of the American Dream to immigrants from all over the world, remains irresistible to tourists. New York is also headquarters of the United Nations (UN), the symbol of world-government, the place where representatives of the world’s nation-states assemble to uphold norms of international law.

New York is at the same time a city of destructive creation that harshly regulates its poor. It is the most expensive city to live in the world. For working class New Yorkers, whose inexhaustible productivity throws off that tremendous energy that defines the aura of the city, New York is often a nightmare. As it is for the large population of poor households who toil in a twilight zone of existence. Many of the homeless in New York are people with mental illness, criminalised by New York’s police department. The city’s poorest neighborhoods are constantly targets of severe police surveillance. Aggressive policing of African American and Latinx people and their neighbourhoods enforces deep-seated ethno-racial status inequalities.

New York also reflects extraordinary economic inequalities of income and wealth, much more than the US does. Insofar as the Gini coefficient is a reliable index of economic inequality, for the US as a whole, the Gini was 0.486 in 2022; for New York City in the same year, it was 0.555. Among the 10 largest cities in the US, New York City alone holds the dubious distinction of displaying a statistically significant increase, between 2010 and 2022, in the Gini index of inequality.

These inequalities began during the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and widened and deepened during the 1980s and beyond. During those decades the US ruling class responded to its squeeze on profitability – an outcome of competitive catching up by Germany and a Japan-led East Asian region – by actively promoting deregulation and deindustrialisation; by shutting down industrial plants; by downsizing and layoffs; by offshoring and outsourcing production; but, above all, by redirecting itself toward producing and reproducing a speculative financial expansion on world scale, centered on New York City.

Fiscal and monetary policies were deployed to redistribute incomes and wealth toward the top 1% of the city’s financial elite. In the first decade of the 21st century, unregulated financial speculation created the conditions for the great crash of 2007-09 in Wall Street, which was swiftly followed by an equally great bailout (amounting to $750 billion) of the bankers and financiers – by the newly elected Democratic President Barack Obama – responsible for the meltdown in the heartland of global capitalism. The argument for these bailouts was that the banks were ‘too big to fail’. No such bailouts were offered to the working class or the middle class.

The tremendous resentment against bailouts of the capitalist elite birthed the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in New York in September 2011. The movement that began with the occupation of Zuccotti Park – renamed Liberty Park by its occupiers – in the heart of Wall Street, spread like wildfire throughout the US and soon most of the world. Grounded in the deep disaffection of working class and middle class New Yorkers who identified the top 1% as their target, this movement became for three long months, the global symbol of resistance to the neoliberal dogma that ‘there is no alternative’.

From general assemblies in the five boroughs to insurgent rallies and rowdy marches that swept through Wall Street with slogans – ‘no war but class war’; ‘they got bailed out; we got sold out’; ‘they say cutback, we say fight back’ – directed against the ruling elite, the movement was ultimately subject to violent police repression and arrests. If the occupiers of Liberty Park were evicted in December 2011, the movement lived on throughout the city in different social centres.

The restless, irrepressible energy of the Occupy Movement also contributed directly and indirectly to the political expansion of the DSA, which campaigned for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and identified with the dissenting position within the Democratic party of Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont, whose commitment to working class values in 2016 inspired Mamdani’s campaign.

There are understated overlaps, despite the differences, between the OWS movement and the DSA campaign. Both came out strongly in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement; both demonstrated against arbitrary police violence in the rebellion that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, with Mamdani supporting anarchist calls to defund the police. Both were linked, directly or indirectly, with the 2016 Bernie Sander’s campaign against revolting economic inequality. If Sander’s denunciations of the oligarchs who rule America divided Democratic party politics, it was nevertheless unable to sway the Democrats to change course, to abandon the party’s commitments to the ruling political class.

It was left to the Republican candidate Donald Trump to champion the great resentment of a large part of the working-class majority in America (63% of the labour force, according to Michael Zweig) and win the 2016 elections on the promise to ‘drain the swamp’ of corruption that infected national political institutions. Although Trump lost to Joe Biden in part because of his failure to govern the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Democratic party that won elections in 2020 under Biden, did little to address key issues of affordability that mattered most to the working- class majority.

Trump won again in the 2024 elections, in large part because of Biden’s blindness on issues of affordability. Biden chose to offer unlimited financial support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022; and he committed the nation’s taxpayers to finance unconditional military support for Israel’s relentless bombardment of Palestinians when Hamas broke out of its concentration camp in Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing at least a thousand Israeli civilians and taking hundreds hostage.

As Israel unleashed full-scale military assault on Gaza, the huge casualties that immediately followed turned public opinion against Israel. It compelled South Africa in late December 2023, to launch a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide.

By the time Mamdani announced he was running for mayor of New York late in October 2024, massive worldwide demonstrations against Israeli State-terrorism routinely dominated global social media. By September 16, 2025, a report published by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, claimed that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In fact, several human rights organisations explicitly condemned the Israeli State for committing genocide – these include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Genocide Watch, as well as B’Tselem (the Israeli Human Rights organisation).

Mamdani’s criticisms of the Israeli State remain grounded in harsh empirical reality; he rejected the charge of anti-semitism leveled against him and is supported by at least 30% of Jews in New York, including organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace.

Along with issues of political and corporate corruption in the city, Palestine and Islamophobia became controversial watchwords of the Mamdani campaign against lacklustre mainstream rivals in the summer primary and in the general elections in November. Noteworthy is Zohran Mamadani’s use of multiple forms of social media (on YouTube, on Instagram) to connect directly with the younger generation in multiethnic languages, working class concerns. These short savvy media messages repeatedly conveyed the image of an uncompromising ally of working families.

Mamdani’s road to victory was built on exemplary focus on what mattered most to millions of New Yorkers: integrity instead of dishonesty, corruption, and complicity in genocide; a working class politics that emphasised respect for the dignity of all working families instead of corporate welfare handouts (tax cuts and subsidies for big businesses); and an affordable city for its multitudes rather than a city for sale to a small clique of billionaires.

MAMDANI’S CROSS-CLASS COALITION

In two insightful articles the historian Adam Tooze identifies the core of Mamdani’s new coalition as belonging to a “middle income band” that stretches from $60,000 to $150,000; while Cuomo did best in the income band that stretches over $150,000 and beyond. Does this mean that Mamdani rode to power on the backs of a middle-class coalition? This is, of course, partly true. However, as the working-class theorist Michael Zweig (The Working Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY) argues, class is best seen not in terms of income or consumption or lifestyle, but in terms of power, defined by the extent of autonomy and authority at the workplace. Income is, of course, associated with class; but it is workplace-power that determines class-belonging.

The middle class of small business owners, foremen and supervisors, managers and professionals, shares some common ground with both the capitalist class and the working class. Although the middle class enjoys relatively greater autonomy and authority at the workplace compared with the working class, its relative power dwindled during the neoliberal decades of austerity and cutbacks. Lower-level managers in big businesses experienced layoffs and downsizing during the 1990s and beyond, even as small business owners in working class neighborhoods lost market share to big businesses.

As capitalist restructuring reshaped lower and higher levels of the educational institution, it also reshaped the lives of teachers in middle and high schools, and of faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY), where the the majority of teaching responsibilities are outsourced to strongly qualified but poorly paid adjunct intellectual workers. All these professional groups – lower-level managers, teachers, adjunct professors, as well as doctors serving in working class neighborhoods, and the majority of nurses – tend to be more closely associated with the working class: most of them have experienced long-term downward social mobility.

Other middle-class groups more closely associated with the capitalist class prospered dramatically – like corporate lawyers, tax accountants, financial professionals – in large part because their work the top 1-2% of the owners and directors of big businesses to make huge fortunes. There is probably no clear answer, as author-activist Barbara Ehrenreich argues, to the question of whether the middle class is an extension of the working class or an elite group more closely aligned with the interests of the capitalist class. (Barbara Ehrenreich (1989) Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class: Pantheon, NY)

The political inclinations of the middle class may or may not be inclined to the Left, or to the Right. Historical circumstances determine the choice. Inequalities in the US distribution of income worsened between 1968 and 2009. If polarisation was moderate at the national level since 2010, it steeply increased in New York City where the earnings of those in the top 3% or 10% saw sharp upward spikes in incomes and wealth, while the rest saw real wage increases that barely kept up with rising costs of living.

The neoliberal austerity decades of the1980s and beyond, thus not only damaged the lives of the working class; it also downgraded the middle class to the status of skilled workers. In New York City, during the Occupy movement, the middle class made its political choice by joining the great class war against big businesses. In 2025, the middle class again made its political choice by strongly supporting Mamdani’s campaign platform that ‘New York is not for sale’ to the billionaires who poured millions into Andrew Cuomo’s campaign even after Cuomo lost the summer primary. The larger point is that the middle class was most certainly not alone in backing Mamdani. It made its choice to combine with the deeper and more powerful working-class currents that swept Mamdani to power.

MAMDANI AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

These multiple class currents cannot be contained in the unions that claim to represent the working class. The labour movement is far bigger than the unions that claim to represent the city’s hugely diverse working class. The divisions within unions make the future of American working-class politics so unpredictable!

As early as December 2024, well before the summer primary in June 2025, the United Auto Workers (UAW Region 9A) with its 20,000 members was outstanding in its principled endorsement of Mamdani. The same may be said of the City University of New York (CUNY) and its Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY); as well as of the largest public sector union representing 150,000 city workers, AFSCME District Council 37. But these were still exceptions. The UAW and the New York’s Taxi Workers Alliance deserve special mention because what they ultimately endorsed was Mamdani’s unimpeachable integrity, his deep respect for the dignity of working-class families, so rare among politicians. The UAW’s appreciation for Mamdani’s personal involvement in auto workers’ livelihood struggles was expressed by its director Brandon Mancilla: “He's been front and centre at every single one of our fights, whether it’s in higher education at Columbia or at the Mercedes-Benz first contract rally.”

But Mamdani was also front and centre of the 15-day hunger strike for debt relief waged by New York City’s taxicab drivers in 2021. His participation in that strike earned him the loyalty, affection, and abiding trust of the city’s 50,000 multiethnic taxi workers – Algerian, Bangladeshi, Senegalese and South Asian workers – who make New York a city that never sleeps. As Bhairavi Desai, president of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance explains, “Members witnessed this humble state assembly member insist on being the last in line behind them to be checked by physicians during the hunger strike”. Taxi workers and their families became Mamdani’s campaign guides and foot soldiers, who along with DSA’s volunteers, knocked on millions of doors in solidarity with a new type of city politics. Bhairavi observes that taxi drivers identified completely with Mamdani’s focus on immigrants and workers: “they see Mamdani carrying the working class with him in every step he takes toward power”.[1]

If the UAW lobbied hard for support for Mamdani among other labour unions before the summer primary, these efforts were in vain! Most unions backed the corrupt Cuomo, perhaps in part because Mamdani was a political nonentity before February 2025, polling in the 1-5% range. New York City’s Central Labor Council (NYC-CLC) of the AFL-CIO with its million workers belonging to 300 unions did not endorse Mamdani until he had decisively defeated Andrew Cuomo in June, winning 56% of the votes to become the Democratic party’s candidate in the general elections in November. It was only then that previously neutral unions like the United Federation of Teachers, as well as former Cuomo endorsers like the largest healthcare union in the northeast (SEIU-1199) and SEIU-32BJ (representing doormen and building workers), stepped up to endorse him.

Mamdani had to prove capable of defeating Cuomo with whatever support he could mobilise with his radically different vision for the future of the labour movement. NYC-CLC President Vincent Alvarez seems to have realised Mamdani’s authenticity only at the end of June 2025, when he admitted that “Zohran Mamdani shares the… Labor Movement’s vision for a city where working people have power, dignity, and opportunity…. We look forward to partnering with him to advance a pro-worker agenda and … to fight for policies that protect the right to organise, invest in union jobs, and ensure economic growth doesn’t come at the expense of workers”. For his part, Mamdani accepted the NYC-CLC endorsement, as ‘a profound honor that confers a solemn responsibility to deliver on our shared vision’, and he promised to stand with organised labour and deliver a city everyone can afford.

MAMDANI AND MINORITY GROUPS

One reason for Mamdani’s success was his willingness to listen attentively to voters’ concerns. Many African American and Latinx voters who voted for Trump in the 2024 general elections, voted for Mamdani because the core issues of unaffordability resurfaced strongly despite Trump’s victory. Although Mamdani did less well in predominantly lower-income African American neighborhoods of the city in the June primary, he did far better in the November general elections in those same minority neighborhoods, as his working-class and middle-class volunteers extended their campaign into the city’s lower-income precincts. Younger voters, irrespective of race and gender, turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Mamdani.

Mamdani has often been accused of anti-semitism by his opponents because of his criticisms of Israel. Critics of Israel are branded as Hamas supporters. To equate anti-semitism with criticism of Israel is highly questionable. Mamdani denies the charge, and a non-trivial slice of Jewish New Yorkers back him. At least 30% of Jewish New Yorkers voted for Mamdani; and 68% percent of American Jews have negative views of Israel’s current government.

If Americans should not discount the resurgence of anti-semitism in the US, neither should they dismiss Islamophobia. Since the terrorist attacks on Manhattan’s twin towers, Islamophobia became embedded in the nation. Political policing of Muslims became part of the US War on Terror and ‘Black Identity Extremists’, and as part of the effort to undermine the Black Lives Matter Movement. There was no attempt in mainstream media to ask if US foreign policy in Afghanistan and West Asia were connected to international terrorism.

Mahmood Mamdani (the mayor-elect’s world-renowned father who teaches at Columbia University) observed in 2004 that stereotypical media constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslim in American minds, are simplistically associated with support for or criticism of US foreign policy in West Asia and US endorsement of Israeli state terrorism.

As for the anti-Jewish threat in the nation, it comes largely from the right. As journalist Ed Luce (“Don’t blame the left for US antisemitism”, Financial Times, November 4, 2025) observed in the Financial Times, “Trump has built his appeal on licensing every prejudice under the sun. In nativist social media, and especially on Musk’s X, Nazi admiration is no longer in hiding. Now it threatens to enter America’s bloodstream”, as “a constellation of figures – from JD Vance, the US vice-president, to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man – are, wittingly or otherwise, making antisemitism respectable again.”

CAN MAMDANI’S AGENDA SUCCEED?

For young Mamdani, governing a sprawling municipal bureaucracy of 300,000 city workers serving 8.5 million New Yorkers will be a big challenge. He has begun the process of selecting an expert administrative team. Can they implement his progressive agenda of rent freeze, free buses, free childcare, and 200,000 new affordable housing units, all paid for by taxes on billionaires and millionaires?

Mamdani took the bold step of meeting with President Trump in Washington in late November. To everyone’s surprise, the meeting was not a ‘showdown’ between two diametrically opposite personalities, perhaps because both agreed to reaffirm their common affordability agenda on which both won their elections. It is not clear whether Trump will deploy ICE on New York’s streets to pursue his anti-immigrant politics. For the moment, we may want to trust on Mamdani’s resourcefulness.

That still leaves Governor Hochul in Albany, a centrist Democrat, who endorsed Mamdani’s campaign, supports his universal childcare agenda (New Yorkers currently spend $22,500/year on childcare for one child), but remains opposed to increasing taxes by 2% on millionaires. Freezing the rent (2.5 million New Yorkers live in rent-stabilised buildings) can be done without Albany’s assistance. The other parts of his agenda will depend on Mamdani’s relationship with Albany. Free buses will deprive New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of over $700 million/year. What alternative sources of revenue will Mamdani’s administration provide to the MTA? Will he able to fund free childcare?

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) cuts federal taxes by $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years, paid for through higher deficits on the one hand; and $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the other. These Federal funding cuts, however, will not directly impact the $7 billion in annual Federal funding that New York City receives. These Federal funding cuts, however, will impact New York’s State-budget by about $4.5 billion per year in lost federal funding, in large part through Trump’s elimination of Obamacare subsidies for legal resident immigrants. They may thus impact the $19 billion in annual funding that NY State channels to New York City, putting pressure on the city’s budget of $116 billion/year. Mamdani’s new administration will have to demand that the state government in Albany manage OBBBA impacts without implementing spending cuts.

Nathan Gusdorf’s instructive appraisal of the fiscal challenges confronting Mamdani’s administration underlines the importance of resisting the anti-tax movement in New York. “The idea that taxing a handful of billionaires is sufficient to achieve social democracy remains a progressive fantasy”. Trump’s OBBA tax cuts are not only skewed towards the top 1%; it is the top 20% of households who earn over $120,000 annually that will receive 70% of the benefits from OBBA tax cuts (= $3.15 trillion). New York can successfully surmount the fiscal challenges it will confront, because “the state and the city are both in a sound economic position to raise taxes given the stock of upper-middle- and high-income earners”. All of the costs of implementing the mayor-elect’s affordability agenda could be effectively covered by his proposed tax increases, which are designed to raise $10 billion annually.

The future of American politics struggles to be rewritten in the aftermath of Mamdani’s stunning victory. Some of the recent electoral turns may be signs of the future. Katie Wilson, a Democratic Socialist, became Seattle’s new Mayor-elect after campaigning on affordability issues. New Jersey’s new Governor-elect, Mikie Sherrill, also won an affordability campaign as a Democratic party candidate. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger become Virginia’s new Democrat Governor-elect. If these wins bode well for the Democrats’ immediate future in the midterms, it is unclear whether the party machine can muster the will to radically shift course. After all, neither Obama nor the Clintons endorsed Mamdani. The NY Senator Chuck Schumer did nothing for Mamdani.

Divided by loyalty to the Israel lobby, and committed to oligarchical interests, the party of the Democrats seems unable to see into the future. Alongside this myopia it retains an enormous condescension for subaltern groups. If Mamdani represents a different life and symbol, the party to which he belongs is far from forging a vision adequate to the challenges ahead.

Ganesh Trichur teaches historical sociology and political economy at the City University of New York. The views are personal.

Dhoom Macha Le: How Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Mayoral Victory Challenges Authoritarian Trends

Zohran Mamdani’s victory will have reverberations beyond New York and beyond America

Harish Khare
Updated on: 10 November 2025
OUTLOOK. INDIA

Questioning the Status Quo: (Left) Campaign posters of Zohran Mamdani; (right) Mamdani at an election party in New York

Summary of this article

Zohran Mamdani’s election as NYC mayor marks a major rejection of divisive, Trump-era politics and reaffirms faith in democratic, inclusive ideals.

His victory symbolises a new political movement that challenges entrenched power and prioritizes ordinary citizens over oligarchic interests.

The outcome resonates globally, inspiring democratic voices beyond the US by proving that course correction in a democracy is still possible.

Just when we were being made to believe that the future belongs to autocrats and authoritarian demagogues, there is cheerful news from New York City: democracy has not exhausted its potential for enlightened change and for moral refurbishing.

Democrats and otherwise sober men and women across the world have every reason to be humming Liza Minnelli’s ode to that city:

Start spreading the news,

I’m leaving today,

I want to be a part of it,

New York, New York

Just a little over two decades ago, the city was the site of a horrendous terrorist act; the iconic Twin Towers got gutted as evil men drove two hijacked aeroplanes into them; thousands died; “9/11” changed the way the world thought about its values and beliefs and priorities; warmongers manufactured a narrative that took us away from basic democratic principles; that cataclysmic event set the stage for over-use of military power, state terror, Islamophobia, and the eruption of a very ugly nationalism. Legitimacy and acceptability accrued to any demagogue who could use the pulpit to talk the language of bigotry and hate. Religious fanaticism all over the world found new voices and new adherents and partisans.

Now the same city has elected a 34-year-old man with a Muslim name as its mayor. His rivals sought to make much of his religion and his ethnic background, but the city voters refused to be scared into favouring those who prosper by mongering distrust and divisiveness. Instead, the voters chose to back a man who was offering hope and togetherness.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory has been cheered across the world because it was as much a triumph of a new kind of politics as it is a rebuff to President Donald Trump and his politics of intimidation and invective, at home and abroad. Trump had, needlessly but unsurprisingly, injected himself into the New York mayoral contest by backroom quarterbacking of Mamdani’s rivals, as also by threatening to slash federal funds for the city should this challenger of status quo got elected.

It is necessary to note that both Mamdani and Trump are quintessential products of that great city. A town of hustlers, swindlers, conmen, creative geniuses, ethnic vibrancy; a city that favours men and women of elegance, style, fashion, wit, imagination, optimism, and sheer perseverance. It refuses to be a settled down place; always willing to engage with one more experiment in social arrangements. Both Trump and Mamdani are New Yorkers at the core. On November 4, the city created a new narrative for itself and it will be decoded and deciphered around the world—for inspiration and for replication. Just as Liza Minnelli sang: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”

Indian Reaction To Indian-Origin Mamdani's Win In NYC Somewhat Mixed

Since his second presidential innings began in January, 2025, Trump has relentlessly devalued the idea of American democracy in the eyes of millions and millions of Americans, and, in the process, has sent out an unhappy message to the world that looked upon the US as an ideal democracy, worthy of emulation. The maximalist interpretation that Trump has put on his presidential powers—and has been allowed to get away with it—has given heart to all the “strongmen” across the world who use the paraphernalia of elective democracy to hollow out the very concept of democracy. In the Trumpian theocracy, authority is not to be questioned; ‘obedience must be rendered to the Caesar’. The very idea of dissent has been reduced to a dirty concept.

Now, a Mamdani victory has not only dented the Trump Supremacy, it has also proved that there is nothing inevitable about Trump and Trumpism. A veritable bonfire of the Trumpian vanities has become the most pleasing spectacle. For one shining moment, New York City has reaffirmed its romantic streak and has given hope to millions and millions, way beyond that exotic metropolitan.

Mamdani was wilfully not a part of the establishment; he wormed his way into the affection of the New Yorkers by questioning the status quo, challenging the political priorities, and the governing protocol of an establishment that is firmly in the grip of oligarchs and other power brokers. Mamdani reminded the city’s voters of the harshness of life behind all the glitter and the shimmer of the Manhattan skyline. And then, he promised to make life for the average voter less harsh and less dehumanising. He invoked the curative power of inclusion, without brandishing the animosities of politics of exclusion that has cast a mesmerising spell on so many Americans. He invited opposition and hostility from every established site of traditional power.

The Mamdani victory will have reverberations beyond New York and beyond America. Because this man, with a very un-American name, has shown how a politician can rekindle a society’s conscience and how he or she can summon the faithful and the hopeful to defiance and resistance to callous authority, and, can enthuse a community to reach out to its inner resources and resilience to forge a higher collective nobility. A seductive moment in history.

The world will watch with attention how Mamdani will defuse and defang the entrenched interests in America’s greatest city and how he will cope with militant non-cooperation, even hostility, from the Trump White House. And, as the older Cuomo, Mario, once remarked that while “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. Governance is a tricky affair; it requires competence, passion, commitment, and conviction to exhort citizens and followers to rise above personal and petty interests. Aspirant political leaders across the world would very much want a Mamdani City Hall to set an example as to how to govern in prose without losing the imagination of a poet.

It is not easy to pigeonhole Mamdani and his fellow-travellers in any recognised political category, but they do constitute a “new” urge and a “new” insistence that the operating principles of governance must be aligned with the needs and requirements and hopes of a majority, rather than being the handmaiden of the dozen-odd billionaires and political honchos.

The progressive, liberal, and other democratic souls around the world would observe how creative and adept Mamdani turns out in using the mandate of the crowds through the existing political institutions; how he would avoid the pitfalls of impatience and righteousness; and, how he would not let his rivals’ viciousness define him. A Mamdani mayoralty in the world’s most global city has a tantalising cachet to it. From the dark days of “9/11” New York moved back, on “11/4” to its old zeitgeist. All is not lost.

Many in India would feel entitled to think of Mamdani’s triumph as a reaffirmation of the intrinsic validity of our own democratic values. That his mother is an Indian, that he would quote Jawaharlal Nehru in his victory oration, that he did not shy away from his Muslim identity are enormously satisfying to our liberal and republican votaries. More than the elevation of a Rishi Sunak as the prime minister of England, a Zohan Mamdani as the Mayor of New York somehow is a pleasing development. In this age of inter-connectedness, a Mamdani victory in New York will give hope to the dispirited democrats call over the world. India will not remain untouched. Some would hope for a similar de-contamination. Never underestimate a democracy’s potential for undertaking course-correction and other similar miracles.

(Views expressed are personal)

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment