3 January 2025, NIICE Commentary 12224
Dr. Md. Abdul Latif
The Shaping of a New Kind of Politician
Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s rise is more than a single candidate’s success—it signals immigrant New York turning presence into power. For decades, South Asian communities helped build the city’s economy and neighborhoods while remaining politically marginalized, underrepresented in leadership despite their central role in daily life. Mamdani’s ascent marks a turning point: a new generation equally at home organizing tenants and workers and navigating budgets, legislation, and coalitions—determined to make government serve those it has too often ignored.
In his inaugural address on Thursday, January 1, 2026, Mamdani delivered a clear message: the left had won a hard-fought mayoral race, and his administration now aims to prove that progressive liberals can govern (CNN). He embodies leadership grounded in movement organizing as much as party politics, connecting housing, transit, and wages to the lived realities of immigrant and working-class New Yorkers and pairing policy with identity.
Instead of diaspora narratives of individual success, he stresses collective wins—organizing, coalitions, and representation that produce material change. He connects South Asian and Muslim communities, multiracial working-class neighborhoods, and younger justice-focused voters without turning anyone into a symbol. His edge is building durable majorities across difference. His rise reflects changing immigrant expectations: less deference to gatekeepers, more accountability; less awe of proximity to power, more pressure to use power to deliver. It may be an early sign of a broader urban political realignment.
The Journey of the U.S. South Asian Diaspora
The U.S. South Asian diaspora is marked by resilience and reinvention. Waves arriving from the 1960s through the 1980s came for school, work, and stability, navigating tough immigration systems while building lives in hospitals and labs, small businesses, factories, taxis, and service jobs. For many first-generation families, the goal was simple: legal status, financial security, and better futures for their children.
Politics often felt out of reach—not from apathy, but from time constraints, language barriers, documentation worries, and unfamiliar civic norms. Instead, communities built belonging through temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches, language schools, festivals, parades, and mutual aid that helped newcomers find housing, jobs, and support, raising kids more fluent in American public life and readier to challenge it.
That shift is now clear. Second- and third-generation South Asian Americans, and newer immigrants shaped by post‑9/11 and multiracial movements, have risen across many fields and increasingly in organizing and electoral politics. A community once focused on acceptance now presses for representation, equity, and real power.
Representation as Substance
Representation is hollow when reduced to symbolic “firsts.” Zohran Mamdani’s rise matters because he turns recognition into leverage—using office to broaden whose needs count and who shapes policy. He refuses the immigrant-politics script of being praised as a figurehead while dodging the conflicts governing demands. He treats representation as outcomes, not ceremony. His focus on housing and transit isn’t demographic branding; it’s the working-class math of rents beating wages, commutes stealing time, and public systems failing those who rely on them.
For South Asian Americans, this shifts identity from cultural pride to where power lives: budgets, tenant protections, wage enforcement, schools, public safety, and environmental health. Belonging isn’t just affirmed; it’s negotiated through policy. His ascent signals a generational turn: older immigrants sought security through conformity and endurance; younger South Asian Americans pursue it through participation—organizing, voting, testifying, demanding accountability. Concrete talk about tenants’ rights or climate policy makes politics legible and reachable. Most of all, it moves the diaspora from feeling like guests to seeing themselves as stakeholders—and authors—of America’s future.
The Diaspora’s Emerging Power
The South Asian diaspora must turn pride into participation. Charismatic leaders can spark turnout, but durable influence comes from organizing around shared priorities and staying engaged beyond any one election. That shift is already happening. Registration and turnout drives, plus issue-based organizing, are expanding in South Asian–majority communities from the Northeast to Michigan, Texas, and California. Civic groups are mentoring young people and women into advocacy, campaigns, and public service. Language and faith spaces increasingly teach civic basics—budgets, school boards, and the importance of primaries. Social media and diaspora networks now link entrepreneurs, students, organizers, and professionals across states, turning scattered enclaves into a more coordinated constituency.
The lesson is clear: power can’t depend on one person; it must be built into institutions. Communities need year-round infrastructure—volunteers, canvassers, researchers, fundraisers, translators, and communicators—to sustain engagement and hold leaders accountable. For a diaspora long centered on education and mobility, democratic participation is also a protection for prosperity. Moving from community to constituency is about voice: who sets the agenda, who is heard, and who benefits. As South Asian Americans serve on boards, councils, unions, associations, and advocacy groups, they are not just joining civic life—they are shaping it.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
As Mamdani said, “I will no longer be in the shadows.” The test is whether the South Asian diaspora sustains participation, not just pride. Political visibility brings pressure: higher expectations and scrutiny, generational splits over “progress,” ideological rifts, and the risk that one leader becomes personality politics instead of a durable civic project.
Structural barriers remain—thin representation in policymaking, racial and religious bias, weak access to power networks, and economic precarity that limits time. The aim is more than visibility: civic literacy, leadership pipelines, and institutions that turn moments into movements through training, local campaigns, school board and city engagement, and steady involvement between elections.
Mamdani’s rise also demands accountability. Representation can’t replace results. A mature presence welcomes principled dissent, insists on transparency, and rewards leaders who listen and govern with empathy, competence, and the courage to confront wrongdoing. With mentorship, policy hubs, and rooted campaigns, South Asian Americans can build many leaders and a lasting democratic identity—proudly South Asian and fully American.
The Light That Spreads South Asia and Beyond
Zohran Mamdani’s political rise does more than energize a New York district; it signals a generation ready to challenge power without losing empathy. For many South Asian young people, it affirms a familiar truth: leadership begins with service, discipline, and moral clarity, not titles.
That idea resonates far beyond the diaspora. Across South Asia, a new civic generation is rejecting the notion that politics belongs to dynasties, strongmen, or elites. Through campus organizing, mutual-aid networks, labor campaigns, and climate movements, young people are rebuilding public life from the ground up—often amid censorship, polarization, and intimidation. Their focus is less on symbolism and more on results: safer workplaces, cleaner air and water, fairer opportunities, and dignity for those pushed to the margins.
Mamdani’s example offers not a script to follow, but the confidence to claim agency. It expands what feels possible: that South Asian youth—whether in Dhaka, Delhi, Colombo, Kathmandu, Karachi or Queens —can treat politics as public service rather than status, and as partnership rather than patronage. In that shared demand for equity and accountability, local struggles connect to a wider regional and global push for justice, climate resilience, and a more dignified public life.
Dr. Md. Abdul Latif (PhD in Development Policy) is Global Ambassador & ADB-JSP Scholar & Additional Director at Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (BIGM), Bangladesh.
