A Tale of Two Socialisms: Mamdani Supporters Please Note — New York is Rich Enough to Distribute Wealth. India is Not
- In New York, socialism is a fight over *how* to spend the pie. In India, the fight is still over *whether* the pie exists.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City feels like a jolt of electricity to anyone watching from afar. He is the youngest mayor in the city’s history, the first Muslim, the first South Asian. And yes, he ran as a democratic socialist. Indian leftists, scrolling through their feeds, lit up with pride. Vaishna Roy, editor of Frontline magazine at The Hindu, a left publication, captured the mood perfectly: “Youngest mayor, first Muslim, first South Asian Zohran Mamdani becomes NY mayor. Even more important, a democratic socialist wins. @ZohranKMamdani”
Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor at The Caravan, joined the chorus by reposting INC spokesperson Supriya Shrinate’s post gushing over Mamdani’s reference to Nehru in his victory speech. Even Aakar Patel, the Amnesty International chair and vocal critic of the BJP, shared a celebratory thread comparing the USA to India in the context of Mamdani’s win. It’s a pattern: a wave of tweets from these voices, framing the win as a global vindication of left ideals, shared and liked across Delhi living rooms and X timelines.
But pause for a moment. What exactly is being celebrated here, and from where?
New York City runs on a budget larger than most nations. The city’s adopted budget for Fiscal Year 2025 stands at $112.4 billion. Its public hospitals treat millions. Its schools, flawed as they are, spend over $30,000 per student each year. Its housing authority, despite endless scandals, still manages 200,000 apartments. The city collects taxes from Wall Street traders, tech giants, and luxury condos that would make a Mumbai builder weep with envy. Socialism in New York does not mean building a welfare state from scratch. It means redirecting a river of existing wealth toward public goods. Mamdani can promise free buses, municipal broadband, public child care because the money is already there, flowing through a system built on centuries of capital accumulation.
Now travel 8,000 miles east. The same Indian socialists who cheer Mamdani wake up in cities where municipal budgets barely cover streetlights. In Mumbai, the BMC struggles to fill potholes. In Delhi, government schools run double shifts because there are not enough classrooms. In Kolkata, public hospitals turn patients away for lack of beds. The per capita income in India hovers around $2,500. In the United States, it is $85,000. That gap is not just numbers. It is the difference between a society that can afford to experiment with redistribution and one that still needs to generate the surplus first.
Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, wrote decades ago in his book “Citizen and Subject” about the trap of applying Northern political models to Southern realities. Colonial rule left behind states too weak to tax, bureaucracies too captured to deliver, and economies too agrarian to fund ambitious social programs. You cannot run a Nordic safety net on peasant incomes. You cannot promise universal health care when half the population earns less than $2 a day. Yet, Indian leftists look at Zohran’s win and see a blueprint, not a context.
In his victory speech, Zohran Mamdani tipped his hat to Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of India’s own socialist experiment. That model, launched with grand promises in the 1950s, shackled the economy under the License Raj.
And here is the deeper irony. In his victory speech, Zohran Mamdani tipped his hat to Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of India’s own socialist experiment. That model, launched with grand promises in the 1950s, shackled the economy under the License Raj. Private enterprise needed government permission to produce anything from steel to soap. Public sector giants like Hindustan Machine Tools and Indian Telephone Industries became symbols of inefficiency, bleeding resources while delivering shoddy goods. Growth crawled at the infamous Hindu rate of 3.5 percent for decades. Foreign exchange reserves dipped so low that India pawned gold in 1991.
The same Nehruvian framework that Mamdani salutes from a New York podium turned India into an economic basket case, dependent on imports for basics while millions stayed trapped in poverty. It spawned rampant corruption, as the license system turned bureaucrats into gatekeepers who demanded bribes for every approval, fostering a permit-quota culture where well-connected firms thrived and small players starved, all while the black market boomed under layers of red tape. The left still clings to that legacy, blind to how liberalization, not socialism, finally lifted hundreds of millions out of destitution after 1991.
This is the blind spot. They celebrate a victory built on American abundance while ignoring the Indian scarcity that makes their own slogans ring hollow. In New York, socialism is a fight over *how* to spend the pie. In India, the fight is still over *whether* the pie exists. One city can afford to dream. The other is still learning to bake. Even the BJP, despite being in power for over a decade, still flounders on basics like job creation and rural distress, as seen in the 2024 election shock where it lost its majority and had to cobble coalitions amid rising inequality and manufacturing slumps.
Mamdani’s win matters. But it matters in New York, where the foundations are solid. In India, the real work begins long before the victory lap. Build the roads. Fix the drains. Grow the economy. Only then can the celebration mean something more than wishful thinking.
(Top image background, courtesy of REALM.)
Vikram Zutshi is an American journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion, art, history, politics and culture.