By Lavanya DJ
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.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
