In early November, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election in a landslide, a victory that sent shockwaves across United States politics and galvanised the country’s political left.It was a dramatic turnaround for a campaign that – less than a year earlier – had been polling at 1 percent support.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAmong those who were most surprised was Zohran’s own father, Mahmood Mamdani.“He surprised me and his mother,” Mahmood told Al Jazeera Mushaber reporter Allaa Azzam in an interview this week. “We wouldn’t expect him to become mayor of New York City. We never thought about it.”But Mahmood, an anthropology professor and postcolonial scholar at Columbia University, framed his son’s electoral success as evidence of a shifting political landscape.Zohran, for instance, campaigned heavily on questions of affordability and refused to back away from his criticisms of Israel’s abuses against Palestinians, long considered a taboo subject in US politics.He is the first Muslim person to become mayor of the country’s largest city by population, as well as its first mayor of South Asian descent.“There were certain things that were near and dear to him,” Mahmood explained. “Social justice was one of them. The rights of Palestinians was another.”“These two issues he has stuck by. He’s not been willing to trade them, to compromise them, to minimise them.”Inside the Mamdani familyThe son of Mahmood and Indian American director Mira Nair, Zohran first emerged as the frontrunner in the mayoral race in June, when his dark-horse campaign dominated th …
