I reported on the Zohran Mamdani Campaign for six months and documented South Asians' rise to power in New York City
An inside look into this reporter's diary
Well, that was an extremely productive six months.
Even though it’s been several weeks since the night at Brooklyn Paramount, when Zohran Mamdani took the stage after being declared the mayor-elect of New York approximately 35 minutes after the polls closed at 9 pm, on this Substack we’re only now catching our breath.
After working (like several other local reporters covering this election) for over five weeks without a break until Election Day, I wrapped up several post-election interviews — two of them being Hindi language podcasts — wrote a few non-election related pieces and snapped my laptop shut for a whole week to go to upstate New York for what seemed like an extremely well-deserved break. As I sat toasting my toes in front of a real fireplace (!) and letting my brain melt into a puddle, the gravity of the coverage I was able to accomplish over the past few months started coming into focus.
When I left home that Monday in April to wander the streets of Richmond Hill despite having no sources lined up to speak with, I did not think I was covering what was going to become one of the most historic election in the lifetime of most New Yorkers. I had spent the entirety of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 traveling across the US (it felt like I’d been all over the country even though it was only 16 cities) with the revised edition of my book, Coming Out as Dalit, which had released in February last year via Beacon Press. I had known Zohran Mamdani was running for Mayor when a few mutuals started posting about the fundraisers they were hosting for him in November last year.
It was around the time he had posted his now iconic video of interviewing New Yorkers who had voted for Trump in the Presidential Election at Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx. Then another one of his videos, where he took a dip in the Atlantic ocean at Coney Island beach dressed in a suit in freezing weather in December went viral and I remember thinking that here was a campaign that showed real promise.
I first came across Zohran Mamdani in 2019 when Indian and international media paid enormous attention to the music video for his rap single Nani, featuring beloved desi cooking icon and actor, Madhur Jaffrey, that Mamdani had released under his rap name Mr. Cardamom. As someone who was extremely active on Desi Twitter at that time (Coming Out as Dalit had released in South Asia that year and Twitter was still haloed ground for marginalized voices) I often came across Zohran’s tweets and liked many of them.
He was also, of course, the son of Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani, making him an heir apparent to the upper echelons of South Asian intelligentsia, at least to those of us with awareness or connections to Indian cultural spaces.
While traveling to college towns in upstate New York with my book at the beginning of 2025, I continued to come across stories around Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy, reading about how his fundraisers were attended by Lower East Side micro-celebrities in New York Magazine, or watching videos on Zohran Mamdani breaking his Ramadan fast by eating a burrito on the subway (much to the outrage of several native New Yorkers). But what stood out the most to me was a single line in an early New York Times piece on Zohran’s campaign
The piece which chartered the unlikely (it was March) candidacy of a Democratic Socialist candidate had pinned the entirety of Mamdani’s campaign on a coalition of young Brooklyn and Queens voters and South Asian New Yorkers, whom it assumed as a monolith. I had followed Zohran’s 14-day strike with the Taxi Worker’s Union in 2021, along with his vocal protest of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which aimed to unfairly target the country’s Muslim residents.
And most importantly, I was aware of Zohran Mamdani’s strident and forceful opposition to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who remains increasingly popular among New York’s Indian diaspora. Knowing what I knew about South Asians in New York, where Indian Americans are among the largest subgroup, I was fairly certain that his support within South Asian communities was not going to be as uniform and unambiguous as the New York Times had assumed.
So, the day after I wrapped up my last event of the Coming Out as Dalit book tour, (which was a talk with authors Mona Eltahawy and Roohi Choudhry at artist Pyaari Azaadi’s studio in Bushwick ) I took the subway to Woodside in Queens to visit the most known (and likely the only) Dalit Sikh place of worship in the city — The Shri Guru Ravidass Gurdwara. Zohran had attended the Sikh Day Parade in Midtown a few days earlier, and I wanted to know how the Dalit community was thinking of a South Asian candidate who was running for New York’s Mayor.
I found one of the Gurdwara’s Dalit priests who hadn’t yet heard of Zohran but told me about the caste discrimination he had experienced in other Sikh places of worship. That day, I spoke to close to thirty South Asian New Yorkers, which included store owners, people shopping for groceries, folks sipping on chai whilst standing around paan shops, waiting for buses on corners and sampling chaat from one of the several food trucks in Jackson Heights — two had heard of Zohran because his campaign volunteers had requested to put up his posters in their shops. One knew Zohran because his wife had showed him the videos. Most, however, didn’t want to discuss politics.
I came back late in the evening thinking I had a story here which was important. Zohran was already doing well in the early polls, coming at a distant second to Andrew Cuomo. But outside of the so-called gatekeepers of South Asian spaces, many desi New Yorkers were not yet aware of his campaign.
As I continued reporting, I reached out to a few of those leaders whose names repeatedly showed up in press mentions related to South Asian communities. Through them I was able to access parts of South Asians spaces that until now I had not been part of — like the NYPD Vaisakhi celebration for Sikh communities in Queens or Bangladeshi local community meetings in Parkchester in the Bronx.
But here, I also noticed some familiar patterns of political engagement that I was used to seeing back in India but did not think would encounter in New York. Many South Asian New Yorkers I spoke with, bluntly told me that they didn’t engage with politics in the city but instead were focused on the political developments in their home countries. However, many of them still voted — only for candidates the community leaders told them to vote for. And until then, Zohran had seemingly not convinced many of the leaders who held the keys to South Asian communities in New York City.
Of course, all of that was going to change in the next few months as the Mamdani campaign would flood South Asian neighborhoods with volunteers and Zohran Mamdani would visit dozens of mosques, gurdwaras and Hindu temples, connecting with a wide swath of South Asian New Yorkers, both in person, as well as online through Hindi, Urdu and Bangla language videos.
For my initial reporting, I spent almost every single day in May and early June taking the subway to South Asian plurality neighborhoods like Richmond Hill, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Ozone Park, Kensington, Midwood and Parkchester, even hopping on the ferry to Staten Island to speak to the Sri Lankan community on the island. I met with hundreds of volunteers and organizers from DRUM Beats and CAAAV Voice, both working class focused organizations that had endorsed Zohran since the day he launched his campaign on October 23, 2024.
In Midwood, I sat in DRUM Beats information sessions, where organizers educated community members about Mamdani’s campaign. The Pakistani community members who were present at the meeting graciously spent hours telling me about why they were planning to vote for Zohran. Pakistani aunties eagerly recounted their experiences with canvassing and how it made them feel more engaged. In Kensington, I saw dozens of Bangladeshi women do phone banking for Zohran in Bangla, as Kazi Fouziya, a senior DRUM Beats leader explained to a Bangladeshi community member the process to register to vote.
I sat for hours in another Bangladeshi restaurant in Parkchester, listening to community members discussed their agendas for the week, valiantly turning down insistent offers for Biryani but finding myself unable to resist the chai. And at Ozone Park, I photographed Bangladeshi seniors feeding grains to pigeons before many told me how they had been in the country for several decades but never voted.
As the date for the Primary election came close and support for Zohran’s campaign snowballed, I saw South Asians in their 20s and 30s rush from their homes upon on hearing he was in neighborhood to take selfies with him. And in the heat of the general election canvassing, I witnessed grown temple attendees mob around him for photographs (including those who did not support Zohran’s candidacy and later revealed that they did not plan to vote for him). And saw others stand in line over and over to get multiple plates of desi sweets that Zohran Mamdani and his mother Mira Nair along with actor Kal Penn distributed out of a food store on Diwali.
At Zohran Mamdani’s rallies, each one held at a subsequently bigger venue (the largest rally was held a week before Nov 4 at Forest Hills and was attended by close to 13,000 people), I stood in the front row for hours, taking photographs and videos alongside several South Asian New Yorkers from DRUM Beats (my shoulders have only now begun to recover), who would often always arrive hours before the start time and stay until the end, passing pakoras and chai in thermos flasks in between.
On the Primary election night in June, I watched Brad Lander turn several shades brighter as he declared “Good Fucking Riddance Andrew Cuomo” merely an hour after the polls had closed to announce Zohran’s historic Primary win. On the afternoon of November 4 on General Election Day, I traveled across Washington Square Park, watching performance artists parody Andrew Cuomo, who, in their minds had lost already. And to Jackson Heights, where I filmed a busker singing his original music about Zohran’s win. I also went to Kensington, where council member Shahana Hanif’s family members told me why this race was so important, and insisted I drink chai (this is a South Asian Substack after all). They had stood outside the election sites for hours, and were drinking copious amounts of the warm liquid to ward off the chill.
It was one of Hanif’s uncles who dropped me off to my next destination at Midwood, where unlike Kensington, the volunteers were forced to vacate the election site early due to the negative reactions and pushback from the local residents (who did not agree with Zohran’s ‘antisemitic’ policies) throughout the day. I was told that the volunteers were forced to call on members from Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) to diffuse the escalating tense situation. But then, I also witnessed a different mood in Midwood, when a few blocks away I pulled up with Raza, a DRUM Beats organizer, to the joyous beats of South Asian dhol and a megaphone sounding off congratulatory messages for Mayor Mamdani, before the polls even closed.
I was still in the line to get into Brooklyn Paramount when a massive crowd erupted into wild cheers — they had all gathered to catch a glimpse of New York’s youngest and first South Asian and Muslim Mayoral-Elect, who had won his race in a record breaking time, turning out the largest number of votes since the 1960s. Inside, among a dizzying array of local celebrities, political stalwarts and upstarts, organizers and media stars, I watched the crowd chant “Goodbye Cuomo” as the headline Zohran Mamdani becomes New York’s Mayor flashed on giant screens. And minutes later I witnessed Zohran Mamdani say “Turn The Volume Up”, before he walked away with his family to the tune of the iconic Bollywood classic Dhoom Machale, leaving this South Asian reporter aghast.
When I started reporting for that first story on South Asians and Zohran Mamdani, which I had offered to close to twenty different publications before New Lines Magazine agreed to publish it, I did not anticipate what the next six months were going to look like. That I would spend weekends and weekdays attending rallies, press conferences and meetings, and feeling extraordinary levels of FOMO when I chose to do anything else (I’m still dismayed about my decision to stay at the Celebrate Brooklyn concert at Prospect Park that Friday in June instead of joining Zohran Mamdani’s team when he walked across the length of Manhattan).
I was able to write multiple pieces around this coverage — I wrote 11 election-related posts on my Substack, published six long-form reported essays and articles; each averaging over 2500 words (five for New Lines Magazine and one for Al-Jazeera), and live ‘blogged’ from mayoral debates on social media. While I’ve always been a print and online journalist, this election, I also expanded into multimedia, adding photography and videos to my lineup. I shot over 3000 photographs over the last six months (I’ve been told I’m a vibes photographer), learning just enough about the ISO triangle and often bumping elbows with Zohran’s official campaign videographers from Melted Solids.
In a monumental election, especially one that was so insistently played out online (Besides Mamdani’s game changing social media strategy, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams both leaned on AI to produce campaign ads), stories can break every hour — as they did, like when Eric Adams almost quit but then decided to stay on in a press conference where he called Cuomo “a snake and a liar”, or when Zohran Mamdani was asked about his comments on India’s Prime Minister Modi at a temple on Diwali.
I shot and produced over a dozen videos (several of them of as exclusives) and was sometimes the only journalist present on scene to report and publish breaking news — even after the campaign received outsized media attention it its last few weeks. My video of Zohran’s response to his comments on Modi from inside a temple went extensively viral on desi social media, which many Indian publications later picked up as a story. During the Primary, my exclusive election coverage from South Asian focused rallies that focused on smaller crowds of Sikh, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (at one Primary election rally in Ozone Park, the ratio of elected officials vs attendees barely broke 1:50) drew over a million collective impressions on Instagram.
My post election piece drew over 300,000 hits on the New Lines Magazine’s website, becoming their most read piece in November. It was also quoted and referenced comprehensively by Indian media outlets. I was the first journalist to cover the potential impact of South Asian voters in this election and on Zohran’s campaign (as cited on DRUM Beats’ official Instagram) and almost all mainstream outlets, including the New York Times and Politico, were able to build on the reporting I published first on this Substack, as well as in NLM and Al-Jazeera. My story remains the only piece that highlighted the absence of caste conversations in this election, and became a massive topic of conversation in Indian and diasporic media.
It was deeply humbling to hear from other South Asian colleagues covering this election (most publicly at the Oct 29 event at Kaafi in Harlem) that my work helped create a ‘new beat’ when none existed before I published the piece about Zohran’s “South Asianness”, here on Featuring Dalits. Even Zohran’s campaign seemingly pivoted some of their strategy soon after my first major New Lines piece suggested that many South Asians New Yorkers did not yet seem him as “New York’s first South Asian Mayoral Candidate” — his Hindi and Urdu language video featured many of the same Pakistani aunties from Midwood that I had asked about his South Asian roots just days earlier.
I remain extremely proud of the work I have been able to do during the last few months, which as long-time readers of this Substack would know, was done in part thanks to the Lauren Brown Fellowship by IWMF. But the rest of this reporting, including the pieces I published here took place without any compensation. While I got paid for my articles and pieces, the current state of journalism did not make for a healthy or even sustainable per word rate.
As a South Asian woman journalist, with over a decade-long career in writing and an award-winning book with which I toured to over 16 cities in the US just last year, it was not surprising that I received scant support from industry’s institutions, given the widespread and near-complete decimation of local and national news. In fact, as I said in the October 29 talk at Kaafi (watch the video here), it felt providential to not have been working full time at a mainstream media outlet, where there would be little guarantee that I’d get to cover an election of this historic nature.
Yet, as close to history I felt while covering this election, and the deliciously lingering contentment I have experienced while reporting for my pieces notwithstanding, working as an independent journalist at this time also came at a severe cost — emotional as well as financial. Almost every other journalist I saw consistently at the elections events over the last six months was employed full time (a few exceptions aside; notably most of us freelancers were South Asian), and had the security of returning to a stable employment when this was over. In fact, several journalist colleagues from this election went on to have even more prominent and illustrious career paths, some receiving major promotions and book deals.
But the reality of being an independent journalist in the current state of the industry is such that those pathways are only available to a select few, and even those appear to be diminishing. Not to mention, the engagement of individuals with news and political events has never been higher than New York’s Mayoral election. Even as more people are consuming news, less journalists are getting paid for it. Most are being forced to leave journalism altogether. But if you’re reading this Substack, chances are that you already know this too.
That is why, after months of resisting, I’m finally moving to monetize my work. Alongside this Substack, I started a new Instagram account “@FeaturingDalitsbyYashicaDutt” to cover reporting and analysis of local US news. There, I’ll be publishing videos and online reporting from a Dalit perspective, along with interviews and reviews. On this Substack, I’ll be writing in-depth analysis and commentary of South Asian politics across the country (and beyond) — whether it be the incoming Mamdani administration under Transition co-chair Lina Khan, the congressional run of Kshama Sawant in Seattle or Saikat Chakraborty’s campaign to unseat Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. Also, watch out for more cultural reporting through reviews of film, television, music and theater.
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