Comment by Riaz Haq 4 hours ago

Dr. Audrey Truschke
@AudreyTruschke
Hindu nationalists wield less power in NYC today versus six months ago.

If you are a Hindu American and frustrated -- even irate -- about Hindu nationalists taking your identity in vain and pushing far-right hate, here are your people and playbook --

https://x.com/AudreyTruschke/status/1988602098620289257?s=20

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How ‘Hindus for Zohran’ pushed back against Hindutva claims in New York mayoral race
The Muslim candidate of South Asian origin faced hostility because he called out the political motivations behind the Gujarat riots.

https://scroll.in/article/1088439/how-hindus-for-zohran-pushed-back...

During the Democratic Party’s election to choose the candidate for mayor of New York City in June, many of us New Yorkers began noticing a strange narrative taking shape – that all Hindus were against Zohran Mamdani.

The message seemed simple: Mamdani was “anti-Hindu” because he had called out the political motivations behind the Gujarat riots of 2002. For so many of us, that couldn’t have felt farther from the truth. We were focused on an election 12,000 km away from Gujarat.

At first, we wondered if we were missing something. Was this really how people felt? Were we in a bubble? We talked among ourselves, called friends, and quickly realised no one we actually knew believed this. We care about issues affecting New Yorkers and affordability. Personally, I care about childcare, and my two-year-old New Yorker cares deeply about buses.

Yet somehow, this narrative was spreading, pushed by Hindutva supporters who, with a few Google searches, I discovered might not even be New Yorkers. Someone from New Jersey flew an obscene banner that read, “Save NYC from global intifada. Reject Mamdani.” At one point, a speaker from India visited our community in Queens and called Zohran a “jihadist zombie”. It was absurd.

This anti-Muslim narrative really gained traction when The New York Times published a story connecting Mamdani to an “anti-Hindu” chant at a protest in noisy, crowded Times Square held in 2020. It was a stretch to imagine he even understood it, let alone participated; all of this misinformation was driving many of us crazy.

For those of us from South Asian backgrounds, this felt like a personal assault. Our communities are intertwined. We live near each other, share meals, watch the same Bollywood films, dance to soca and are shining examples of NRI Fashiongate – united by our undying obsession with Shah Rukh Khan.

We also know this truth: racists don’t care whether we are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, or Buddhist. To them, we’re all just brown. That collective identity, especially post-9/11, has only intensified.

The idea that all Hindus were against Mamdani also ignored who we really are. The Hindu community in New York is wildly diverse – we are Indo-Caribbean, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Indian. We are white, Black and Jewish Americans married to Hindus. We are people who discovered Hinduism through yoga and ayurveda. I even have white friends who’ve taken on Hindu names. That’s the beauty of it.

And that’s the complexity the media, Mamdani’s rival Andrew Cuomo, the billionaire class opposition Mamdani and Hindutva supporters don’t understand.

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When we started this group, I initially thought that showing solidarity with Zohran Mamdani and the Muslim community would be enough. But what we actually did went far beyond that. We didn’t just push back on hate – we neutralised the Hindutva influence in this election.

As Arundhati Roy says, “Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness and our ability to tell our own stories – stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”

Comment by Riaz Haq 4 hours ago

Sushant Singh

@SushantSin

Modi's silence on Mamdani’s victory reveals what terrifies Hindutva supporters. Young, progressive, interfaith, anti-establishment & unafraid, Zohran represents everything whose existence the Hindu Right has spent decades denying I write
@thecaravanindia

https://x.com/SushantSin/status/1988288127392510280?s=20

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Sushant Singh

@SushantSin

His is a modern, multi-faith family grounded in progressive values—precisely the kind of modern Muslim the Hindu Right wants to delegitimise. Acknowledging Zohran could mean acknowledging an Indian legacy that Modi is trying to bury.

https://x.com/SushantSin/status/1988288791292113349?s=20

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Narendra Modi's silence on Zohran Mamdani’s victory reveals what terrifies Hindutva supporters

https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/modi-silence-mamdani

Hours after Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in the Democratic primary in June, in the race to be the mayor of New York City, the actor and Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarian Kangana Ranaut took to social media to attack him. She reshared an earlier clip of Zohran protesting the construction of the Ram Mandir atop the demolished Babri Masjid, and declared that he was “ready to wipe out Hinduism.” Ranaut pointed out that this was despite having Mira Nair—a celebrated filmmaker “raised in great Bharat” who won the Padma Bhushan—for a mother and the prominent postcolonial theorist Mahmood Mamdani—of “Gujarati origin”—for a father. “And obviously son is named Zohran,” Ranaut wrote, “he sounds more Pakistani than Indian.”

Ranaut’s singular statement revealed the Hindu Right’s playbook in India today. Why was Zohran instantly deemed anti-Indian and threatening? He is Muslim, married to a Syrian-American, and refused to genuflect before Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's majoritarian project.

The fury now directed at Zohran from India’s right-wing ecosystem says far more about the Modi government than about the 34-year-old democratic socialist who has just taken charge of America’s most populous city. It exposes the ideological brittleness at the heart of Hindutva—a movement so insecure in its vision of India that it cannot tolerate even diaspora success stories that fall outside its narrow script. Your Indian lineage can be celebrated only if you bow to Modi, embrace Hindutva, and stay silent on Ayodhya 1992 or Gujarat 2002.

The studied silence from Modi on Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory speaks volumes, too. No congratulatory message has emerged from the prime minister’s usually hyperactive social media presence. This is not accidental but strategic. Zohran represents everything whose existence the Hindu Right has spent decades trying to deny.

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