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IS Zohran Mamdani a communist as Donald Trump claims he is? Or, likelier still, he is the Godot that Vladimir and Estragon were waiting for sans hope? On his part, Zohran Mamdani says he is a democratic socialist, a nomenclature subtly distinct from Europe’s tamed or confused social democrats of yore. It would be adequate for his teeming fans though if he were just a socialist with Zohrani characteristics, somewhat like the Chinese who are giving Donald Trump a run for his money with an innovation called socialism with Chinese characteristics.
We need to step back in time to figure out which description suits Mamdani better. First off, he is clearly not the spectre Karl Marx had threatened Europe’s colonial capitalists with in 1848. The Marxian apparition of an egalitarian revolt did terrify Europe but the quest took an unplanned turn. It prompted, instead, a response from the bourgeoisie so vicious that it continues to ricochet 177 years after the Communist Manifesto was published. Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Bandera, Golwalkar, McCarthy, Ayub Khan, Pinochet, Reagan, Thatcher, Zia all come to mind readily as lead players deployed around the globe to vacate the occasionally real but mostly imagined communist threat.
The bourgeoisie set up religio-cultural structures and patronised existing ones — Nazis, fascists, Ku Klux Klan, apartheid to arrest or retard the spectre of egalitarian unity. They freely used a preponderance of religious gullibility in South Asia to challenge and subdue ‘communist godlessness’. The success was partial. The Marxian spectre would find expression where it was least expected — in Russia, China and eventually in Vietnam and Cuba, and also less durably elsewhere. For Mamdani’s politics, the 1957 Kerala experiment seems relevant — a communist government in a bourgeois state.
Occasionally, the bourgeois zeal to place roadblocks for communist prospects has gone awry. As Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein overreached his genius and produced a monstrous antidote to his own quest, the bourgeoisie would throw up a Narendra Modi here or a Donald Trump there to their own chagrin. If Mamdani’s victory march could transcend the insurmountable obstacles on his way to mayorship of New York, it owed at least partly to right-wing chaos amid a surge of anti-Netanyahu sentiment in their ranks. That greatly impaired the clout of Mamdani’s Zionist opponents.
For Mamdani’s politics, the 1957 Kerala experiment seems relevant — a communist government in a bourgeois state.
The importance of the Charlie Kirk tragedy has not been fully grasped by the world for the havoc it wreaked on the American right even as it nearly wrecked Zionism’s America nexus. It so happened that both, the American right and Zionism were in Mamdani’s crosshairs, and it would perhaps help to see how Kirk’s assassination unleashed a chain of events that possibly prompted the suspension of carnage in Gaza and triggered a backlash within MAGA spaces. It was this backlash that would help not only Mamdani’s electoral bid but also shore up the chances of pro-establishment Democratic opponents of Trump in the races that took place in different states for assorted posts simultaneously.
The sniper shot that struck Kirk had also lacerated the Zionist pulpit — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — that far too many US presidents had genuflected before.
It was the Jewish anti-Zionist journalist Max Blumenthal’s investigations that revealed the terror Benjamin Netanyahu felt with Charlie Kirk’s killing. How often have we seen Netanyahu appearing on TV post-haste to condole the passing of a rapidly evolving patron-turned-critic of Israel that Charlie Kirk had become. The moping TV appearance was seen as Netanyahu’s way of screaming that the murmurs of an Israeli hand in Kirk’s death were false.
However, the martyrdom of Palestinian women and children had after all triggered an intensive review of the state of play within the MAGA movement, and Kirk was shaping to become its loudest spokesman. The media influencer had the wherewithal to heave Trump over the victory line in November 2024 and he had the capacity to cry halt to America’s boundless support to Netanyahu’s Israel. His death a month before his 32nd birthday inevitably derailed the politics of Andrew Cuomo and helped sift the Zionists from New York’s Jews. In so doing, it helped create a new middle ground that would rise in support for Mamdani.
The left and the right have come together often enough in history although not always intentionally, as they did, for example, to topple the Shah of Iran. They also came together to unseat Indira Gandhi in 1977. It is of course equally true that there is little truly sacrosanct about the left and its erstwhile allure today. There was a time when Nikita Khrushchev could see a life of friendship with president Kennedy, particularly after they precipitated the crisis and then deftly and with courage took the world back from the brink of nuclear holocaust. Kennedy while seeking cohabitation with communism was also an ardent critic of Israeli influence in American affairs. He was laid low.
Zohran Mamdani was born in October 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. His father would have told him of how almost immediately after the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War it brought about, a new word was added to describe democracy. It would henceforth be known as ‘free market democracy’. SPAN Magazine published by the US embassy in Delhi would trim its size. While claiming to save paper, it in fact no longer needed the propaganda budget. The deed, as Shakespeare said, was done. The propaganda agencies had delivered excellently on their promise. My brother and I memorised JFK’s classic inaugural address, whose paper-thin vinyl records were distributed by the US library in Lucknow.
In Samuel Beckett’s play, Godot is an intentionally ambiguous character who serves as a symbol for hope, purpose, or a higher power, and his identity is left to the audience to define. That could be an acceptable way to describe the phenomenon called Zohran Kwame Mamdani.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2025
