Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral victory made him New York City’s youngest mayor ever and its first Muslim leader of South Asian and African descent.
The win signals a generational shift toward inclusive politics in the nation’s largest city.
## Mahmood Mamdani’s View of His Son’s Victory
Mahmood Mamdani describes his son’s success as proof that a new generation of Americans embraces universal values over exclusionary identity.
Zohran openly celebrated being “a Muslim, born in Africa, of south Asian descent,” an identity once seen as marginal in US power circles.
The Columbia professor links the victory to New York’s evolving character, where waves of immigrants continually expand the meaning of belonging.
He told The Guardian that Zohran’s campaign broadened “the sense of possibilities” for who can lead America’s global city.
## Exile, Colonialism, and the Question of Belonging
Mahmood Mamdani’s family was expelled from Uganda in 1972 under Idi Amin’s order against Asians.
That trauma shaped his lifelong scholarly focus on who counts as a full citizen in postcolonial nations.
He argues political belonging must be based on residence, not origin or bloodline.
Colonial powers divided people into “native” tribes and “non-native” races; many post-independence regimes kept those divisions alive.
In Uganda today, President Museveni uses “indigeneity” to deny rights to citizens outside their ancestral districts.
Mamdani calls this “slow poison” that kills the national body politic.
## From Anti-Apartheid to Palestine: The Moral Compass
The elder Mamdani sees direct continuity between the anti-apartheid struggle that defined global morality in his youth and the Palestinian cause today.
He credits that tradition for shaping Zohran’s uncompromising stance.
Palestinian rights were “near and dear” to Zohran and became a defining campaign issue, his father told Al Jazeera.
Despite intense pressure, the mayor-elect never diluted criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Mahmood Mamdani believes Gaza has ended the era when Israel’s conduct was widely seen as simple self-defense.
The war has globalized the question of equal rights under occupation, just as apartheid once did.
## What Zohran’s Rise Means for American Politics
Mass deportation threats under the second Trump administration echo the 1972 Uganda expulsion that uprooted the Mamdani family.
Yet Zohran’s victory offers a counter-trend: voters rewarding principle over triangulation.
The scholar sees his son’s win as the possible beginning of a broader rejection of exclusionary nationalism.
New generations shaped by Black Lives Matter, campus Gaza solidarity, and immigrant-rights movements are redefining American universalism from below.
This intersection of postcolonial critique and New York electoral politics shows that colonial legacies remain alive in debates over citizenship, belonging, and justice.
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty will test whether America’s most diverse city can pioneer a genuinely decolonial democracy.
