Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has a Hindu problem—and it’s not going away anytime soon.
New York’s Hindus are the latest group to speak out against the controversial candidate, saying Mamdani, who is a Muslim, plays a sneaky game of victimhood and overt bigotry to target minority groups he doesn’t like — including them.
And his rise to prominence has imported old, bloody, and distant sectarian grievances right into the heart of the Big Apple — exactly where they don’t belong, they say.
The man who wants to be mayor of New York has a peculiar interest in injecting himself into India’s political issues — the country where his parents hail from — kicking a hornet’s nest each time he does.
He has called New York State Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar — the first Hindu-American elected to the body — a puppet of “Hindu fascists.”
In 2020, Mamdani attended a protest in New York’s Times Square against a Hindu Temple being constructed 8,000 miles away in the Indian city of Ayodhya, where he is on camera speaking alongside a scrum of his fellow activists, who are chanting “all Hindus are bastards” in Hindi.
The temple, Ram Mandir, sits on an ancient Hindu holy site that had been colonized by Muslims centuries ago, where they built a mosque. But an Indian court ruled in 2019 the land belonged to Hindus and a temple could be constructed there.
All the while Mamdani’s young, wealthy, white liberal base remains entirely clueless to the history and sensitivities of the Indian subcontinent, activists told The Post, saying they fear what a Mamdani mayorship will mean for not only the mostly peaceful melting pot of New York, but America.
Last month, Hindu-American leaders signed a letter to India’s foreign minister, urging him to take a stand against Mamdani’s “Hinduphobic lies.”
LaGuardia Community College psych professor Lakshmi Bandlamudi of Queens was among those signees, telling the Post she felt “disappointed and shocked” when Mamdani sailed away with the Democrat nomination in June, calling the 33-year-old socialist “ethically unsound.”
“First, as a New Yorker, he would hurt the city with reckless freebies. His comments on Hindus and Jews are terrifying, and it adds fuel to the already existing fire,” she told The Post.
Asked what she felt was most important to New York’s Hindu community, she said: “To live in harmony in a diverse city like New York. When one community is pitted against another, the harmony is destroyed. Mamdani is too divisive.”
The list of grievances against Mamdani from outspoken Hindus is long—and growing. When a statue of Gandhi outside a Hindu temple in Queens was destroyed by vandals three years ago, Mamdani remained silent — shocking many in the South Asian community, of which he considers himself a part. Others running for mayor condemned the vandalism, but Mamdani has yet to.
Even more egregious — Hindu rights activists tell The Post — is the fiery and offensive rhetoric Mamdani spews at India’s current leadership, calling the democratically-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “fascist” and “war criminal.”
Mamdani has said that Modi, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who he also calls a “war criminal” — should be banned from entering the US.
“If you are a responsible politician, you have to be careful in what you say. You don’t just shoot your mouth. He’s a dangerous bastard,” Satya Dosapati, a Hindu-American, 67-year-old telecom worker from New Jersey told The Post.
Mamdani’s team responded with a comment, saying: “Hinduism is a meaningful part of Zohran’s life — his mother is Hindu, and that side of his family has deeply shaped his values.
“Those same values guide this campaign: the belief that every New Yorker, no matter their race, religion, or where they come from, deserves a city that values and protects them. Zohran rejects rhetoric targeting Hindus and opposes any politics of bigotry.”
In June, days before the primary, Dosapati was part of group of Hindus who funded an aerial letter banner that was flown over the Hudson River reading: “SAVE NYC FROM GLOBAL INTIFADA. REJECT MAMADANI.”
“New York is a beautiful city which has got so many people from all over the world,” Rahul Sur, a former United Nations officer from Manhattan, told The Post. “And then you talk about ‘globalize the Intifada’ and then you expect to run the most beautiful, accomplished, rich, diverse city in the world? Unbelievable.”
Mamdani, too, has bizarrely and falsely suggested India committed a genocide against Muslims living in the Indian state of Gujarat following 2002 civil unrest after Muslims set a train on fire carrying Hindu pilgrims, resulting in 59 pilgrims’ deaths.
At a candidate forum this year, Mamdani claimed there was a “mass slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat,” after that train attack and that “people don’t even believe we exist anymore,” implying a near-erasure of the Muslim population there.
In fact, there are more than six million Muslims in Gujarat today, or over ten percent of the population, and growing.
Mamdani’s father, leftwing Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, hails from Gujarat, which is also the birthplace of Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots — when Mamdani was just a ten-year-old living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“He’s definitely offensive and dangerous, too. Hindus are upset,” Hemant Patel, a former software engineer and Hindu rights activist from Chicago, who also signed the letter against Mamdani, told The Post.
“Look at the UK. Look at London. It is in very bad shape,” Patel said, telling The Post he was warning about a surge in radical Islamic violence—like rape gangs and knife attacks, and now rampant censorship—in that city 15 years ago, believing it’s been in part due to Muslim ideologues.
Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, the largest Hindu advocacy group in the US, told The Post: “We’re also monitoring for any further dehumanizing rhetoric towards Hindus —[Mamdani’s] liberal use of the terms ‘extremist’ and ‘fascist’ in the context of Hindu American leaders, and Hindu symbols and places of worship is deeply troubling. As is his refusal to condemn anti-Hindu rhetoric at rallies he has attended.”
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