Zohran Mamdani has lit up social media in unusual places around the world far away from ground zero of his triumph. In India, a bit more than others. The Indian-born mayor-elect’s victory speech laced with quotes of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Bollywood music has added to the buzz, but his desi connection is not the only reason why Mamdani resonates across three oceans.
Like people in democracies everywhere weighed down by populist demagogues and dispirited by sterile politics governed by big money and small men, Mamdani has inspired hope of a breakthrough in India as well.
In fact, nowhere does the lessons of his success seem more urgently relevant than in India, which has gone from being the world’s largest democracy to an “electoral autocracy” in a decade under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the opposition has seemed ineffectual in mounting any substantive pushback. This month, Modi triumphed again as an opposition alliance was drubbed in the eastern Indian state of Bihar by a coalition formed by his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party that swept the state election by winning an astounding 88% of the seats in which it contested.
With this victory, Modi has again proved his lock on power is unchallenged and tamped down hopes of...
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