Editorial
Lessons from the Bihar Elections
After the declaration of the 2025 Bihar Assembly election results, many democratic–secular activists have concluded that the BJP–ECI manipulated the polls to engineer an NDA victory. Some have even circulated a letter claiming that participation in elections is pointless, as it only lends legitimacy to a fraudulent process conducted by an authoritarian regime.
The opposition parties have also expressed doubts about the results. The Congress called them “unbelievable”. Rahul Gandhi wrote on X, “This result in Bihar is truly surprising. We could not achieve victory in an election that was not fair from the very beginning.” After a meeting of senior Congress leaders, K.C. Venugopal told reporters, “The result that has come from Bihar is unbelievable for all of us. A 90 percent strike rate is unprecedented in Indian history. We are collecting data and conducting a thorough analysis, and within one or two weeks, we will provide concrete proof.” He added, “This entire electoral process is completely questionable. The Election Commission is totally one-sided; there is no transparency.”
Although Maharashtra’s leaders Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray, and RJD Bihar’s leader Tejashwi Yadav have not openly challenged the fairness of the Bihar election, their remarks make it clear that they are not fully convinced by the result.
These sentiments are now being repeated and amplified by lower-level leaders and activists of the Congress and other opposition parties.
The same narrative emerged after the opposition’s crushing defeat in the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections. Then too, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) leadership concluded that the elections were “stolen” through BJP–ECI collusion.
There is no doubt that India’s elections are no longer fair; there is no level playing field in the electoral contest anymore. The BJP has succeeded in curbing the independence of all the pillars of Indian democracy. It contests every election with the structural advantage of a pliant Election Commission (ECI). The Supreme Court has not acted to restore the independence of the ECI—it is now nearly two years since the Central Government passed a law giving itself a dominant role in appointing the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners, and the Supreme Court has yet to begin hearings on the matter. The Special Summary Revision (SIR) was not carried out fairly, as widely reported, with 68 lakh deletions and the addition of 24 lakh electors during the shoddy SIR exercise. The ECI turned a blind eye to numerous violations of the Model Code of Conduct by the ruling regime in Bihar, including communal propaganda and even the distribution of Rs. 10,000 to women voters during the campaign period. It raised no objection to special trains being run to ferry BJP voters from other States. The media has been arm-twisted into becoming a propagandist for the ruling party.
Another factor making the elections unfair is the enormous corporate funding the BJP has received in return for the huge benefits the Modi Government has bestowed on the Ambanis–Adanis and other corporate houses. These include tax concessions and loan write-offs to the tune of lakhs of crores of rupees, huge subsidies under the guise of public–private–partnerships, ‘strategic disinvestment’ in public sector corporations at throwaway prices, transfer of mineral wealth to private corporations for negligible royalty payments, and so much more.
All this, though true, is not enough to fully explain the huge losses suffered by the Congress and the INDIA alliance in the Bihar Assembly elections, and earlier, in the Maharashtra Assembly elections.
We would like to raise some issues here, and urge the leaders of the anti-BJP opposition parties to introspect on them, for we believe that these are the more important reasons behind their electoral defeats in both States.
This is important for another reason too. By placing the entire or main blame for their electoral loss on manipulation, the Congress and the INDIA alliance parties are refusing to examine their internal weaknesses—both in their party structures and election campaigns—in countering the BJP and the NDA alliance.
Yogendra Yadav’s Analysis
Even Yogendra Yadav, an astute observer of elections and a renowned psephologist, does not attribute the Bihar result solely to electoral fraud. In an article published in the Indian Express, “What Those Who Celebrate Bihar Verdict, and Those Who Lament it, Get Wrong”, he acknowledges that India’s elections are no longer fair, for all the reasons listed above. But then, he goes on to make the important comment,
“It is important to distinguish between an unfair and a fraudulent election.”
To explain in greater detail: in an unfair election, the opposition’s chances of winning are not zero; it can win if the victory margin is significant. Thus, if the INDIA alliance–NDA vote ratio is 21:19, the NDA can flip the result through unfair means. But if the ratio is 25:15, then the margin is too high to overturn the result through manipulation. However, in a fraudulent election, the opposition has zero chance of winning, as the ruling party can engage in massive fraud in the voting and counting process.
What the opposition parties and civil society activists are alleging is that the Bihar election was stolen because of electoral fraud. Yogendra Yadav disagrees and writes,
“While many doubts have been expressed on this score in Bihar (belated declaration of turnout figures, discrepancy between postal and EVM votes, high voter deletion, sharp reduction in the votes for ‘others’), we do not yet have any hard evidence that meets the high standards of proof that such a grave charge requires…. Bihar may not be the right place to look for evidence of electoral fraud.”
Yadav argues that the outcome of the Bihar elections is not surprising, as the caste coalition built by the NDA was nearly 5 percentage points larger than that of the MGB. The MGB’s core (Muslim + Yadav) at 32 percent was bigger than the NDA’s core (Forward + Kurmi + Kushwaha + Bania/Teli + Paswan) of 28 percent. But the MGB’s 10 percent auxiliary support (Mallah + Ravidasi + Tanti/Paan) was much smaller and less committed than the NDA’s 20 percent Hindu EBC block.
Therefore, it was advantage NDA right from the beginning. The MGB tried to transcend caste boundaries by making promises such as government jobs—but it was too little, too late. In the words of Yogendra Yadav,
“the last-minute bribe of Rs 10,000 (besides the upping of many pension schemes and reduction in electricity bills) cemented the support that the NDA has assiduously built over elections among women voters. These basics, combined with the low level of expectation from a government and the absence of a pronounced anti-incumbency against Nitish Kumar, are enough to explain the nature of Bihar’s verdict.”
Vignesh Radhakrishnan and Srinivasan Ramani, writing in The Hindu (“Bihar 2025 Election Results: How Alliance Consolidation, Vote Fragmentation Gave the NDA a Landslide Win”), make the same point. They too note that the NDA’s caste coalition was broader, and that the fragmentation of the opposition vote by Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party and the AIMIM further weakened the MGB.
India’s first-past-the-post electoral system—which awards victory to whoever wins the most votes—magnified this imbalance. With only two major alliances and a ten-point advantage in caste arithmetic, the NDA was already positioned for a landslide.
The above analysis is corroborated by electoral data. The numbers clearly show that the NDA would have won the Bihar elections even if the process had been fair. If we hypothetically assign all seats the NDA won by less than 5,000 votes to the MGB, the NDA would still win 185 to 52. And even if we go so far as to assign all seats won by the NDA by less than 10,000 votes to the MGB, the NDA would still retain a comfortable majority: 162 to 75. [Data for this analysis sourced from: Election Commission of India, General Election to Assembly Constituencies: Trends & Results, November 2025: Bihar, https://results.eci.gov.in]
Our Analysis of the Election Results
[This analysis draws on the shared experiences of several civil society activists who worked closely with INDIA-alliance parties, especially the Congress, both before and during the elections. Because these activists work at the grassroots, they also have insights into how the BJP–RSS combine operates on the ground.]
Our analysis of the election results goes deeper than the caste-coalition analysis done by Yogendra Yadav and by Radhakrishnan and Ramani.
We first discuss the huge electoral loss suffered by the MGB / INDIA alliance during the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections.
The BJP–RSS activists do their propaganda work throughout the year—whether elections are approaching or not. They organise innumerable programmes to propagate their ideology in cities, towns and villages; in colleges and schools; and among tribals, Dalits, OBCs and women—especially among Hindus, or those they consider to be Hindus. They have a cadre of dedicated activists who carry out this work relentlessly. And when elections approach, they intensify their efforts.
Despite this intense propaganda work, the support of the godi media, electoral manipulation and enormous corporate funding, the BJP lost the majority of Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra in the 2024 general election. The INDIA alliance won 30 seats, while the NDA secured 17. But in terms of vote share, the difference between the two blocs was negligible—the NDA (BJP + allied parties) got 43.55 percent; while the INDIA alliance (MVA + other INDIA partners) tallied 43.71 percent.
Despite losing by such a razor-thin margin, the BJP leadership took this defeat seriously. It immediately went into campaign mode for the Assembly elections due six months later. The party drew up a list of all the booths it had lost, and launched an intensive, targeted campaign among the voters in all these booths. It assigned hundreds of activists to do this work, who worked with dedication because of their commitment to the RSS ideology. Here is a report from the Economic Times on this. It is a long excerpt, but very informative on how the BJP election machine works:
Focus on 12,000 Swing Booths: How BJP Made Late Shifts, Turned Polls Its Way
By Kumar Anshuman, 30 November 2024
What differentiates Maharashtra from other States won by the BJP is the specific strategy the party adopted to turn the tide in its favour in a State where it suffered a setback just four months back.
In September, union home minister Amit Shah met BJP leaders in Maharashtra. At the meeting, Shah is believed to have instructed the leaders to forget that it is an Assembly election and focus on polling booths in their respective areas. Jarvis Consulting (an in-house agency that handles he campaign strategy and data intelligence for the party) was asked to figure out the swing seats which the BJP has lost or won over the past few elections with a change in voter pattern.
Sources tell ET that the internal party survey identified 69 Assembly seats as the seats which the party will win with minimum efforts…. The focus was to win another 70 Assembly seats to take the party’s tally beyond 125. After an intense exercise, 80 Assembly seats were identified where the BJP won or lost the election with 3–4 percent vote swings…. Once the seats were identified, the next assignment was to identify swing booths in each of the 80 Assembly seats. The party has three broader categorisations of polling booths. The A category booths where the party wins in terms of votes, the B-category booths where it won or lost due to voters changing their minds and the third C-category where it never wins. The area of focus was narrowed down to the B-category booths. After the data mining 12,000 booths were identified as B-category booths which will decide whether the BJP will win or lose the Maharashtra battle.
The total booths in Maharashtra Assembly elections were 1,00,186 but BJP invested heavily on these 12,000 booths.
Once the target was set, the resource mobilisation started three months before the elections in September. ET learnt that Bhupendra Yadav, Vaishnaw and Shivprakash, the national joint general secretary of the BJP, ensured that whatever the team requires be made available to them. Varahe was asked to develop special content for these 80 Assembly seats focusing on regional and local issues to engage with the voters. Five call centres each with around 200 callers came up at Nagpur, Nasik, Pune, Mumbai and Thane. The 1,000 callers were given 10 to 12 booths each and were asked to keep a one-to-one conversation with the booth level workers at least twice a week on one booth.
The article goes on to detail how the BJP also laid special emphasis on women, OBC and tribal voters, drawing up specific plans for each section, and assigning party leaders and hundreds of activists for each section, who campaigned among these sections for 2–3 months before the elections. The article goes on to say:
With the three-month exercise, the BJP was able to increase votes by almost 5 percent in these constituencies. Out of the 69 Assembly seats which the party was sure of winning, it won 64 seats. Out of the 80 seats comprising 12,000 swing booths, the BJP won 68 seats taking the total tally to 132, the highest for the party in the State.
In contrast to the BJP’s intensive campaign in the five months between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, the Congress and its MVA partners did not do any significant electioneering work in the Assembly constituencies until barely three weeks before polling. Overconfident after their Lok Sabha performance, they spent more time bickering amongst themselves than organising a coordinated election campaign to build on their earlier success.
We have considerable experience of working with the Congress at the grassroots. Most local party leaders and activists do nothing to spread the Gandhi–Nehru ideology among the people—the Gandhi–Nehru idea of India, the role of the Congress in the freedom struggle, or the Constitutional values and how they are rooted in our history and freedom struggle. They do not make any efforts to inform the people of the RSS’s betrayal of the freedom struggle and its opposition to the Constitution. They do no work at the grassroot level to counter the BJP–RSS hate campaigns against Gandhi and Nehru, its distorted narratives about Babasaheb Ambedkar, Subhas Bose and Sardar Patel, its propaganda to communalise Indian history, and its campaigns to spread hatred against minorities. Influenced by years of BJP–RSS propaganda, many Congress activists are even confused about the role played by Nehru and the Congress in the development of India after independence.
Even when the Congress central leadership announces nationwide programmes, local leaders merely organise token events—gathering a few party workers for photo-ops rather than engaging with the public. No attempt is made to take these programmes to the people, campaign from house-to-house on them, or mobilise public participation.
Very few Congress activists work out of ideological conviction. The party has only leaders, from local leaders to district leaders to leaders at the Assembly / Lok Sabha constituency level and State level leaders. Most of them are focussed solely on obtaining party tickets. Until official candidates are declared, they do virtually no grassroots work and spend their time lobbying senior leaders. All the leaders aspiring for the ticket in a particular constituency do not even join hands to collectively do ideological work or election propaganda among the people before the official candidate is announced.
Once the official candidate is named, only the official candidate’s followers campaign, while others sulk, sabotage or switch parties. But by the time the nomination process ends, it is too late to mount an effective ground campaign. In Maharashtra, elections were held on 20 November 2024 and campaigning ended on 18 November. Nominations closed on 28 October 2024 and withdrawals on 4 November. Most Congress candidates began election campaigning only after 4 November, that is, once they were assured of the party ticket. How can a party hope to win elections by campaigning for just 14 days, against an opponent that has been campaigning for five months at the grassroots—on top of year-round ideological work?
This criticism applies equally to the NCP (Sharad Pawar). Our limited grassroots experience of working with the party suggests that its activists also largely remain inactive till the tickets are finalised. Till the official candidate is declared, the local leaders who are contenders for the party ticket do no collective campaigning among the people. Once the ticket is finalised, only the official candidate’s faction campaigns in the few weeks before the elections.
In the Maharastra Assembly elections, during the months July to November 2024, for their election campaign, the Congress and the MVA relied almost entirely on rallies, roadshows and public meetings. Many drew large crowds, giving leaders the illusion that they were winning the elections. But what they forgot was that these crowds—40–50 thousand in some cases—were of their followers, or people mobilised by inducements. It did not mean that all these people were going to vote for them. More importantly, they did not realise that majority of the people, the silent and uncommitted voters, remained in their homes. The MVA leaders and activists made no attempt to reach out to these majority of the voters. While the MVA leaders staged events, the BJP–RSS workers quietly went door-to-door, speaking directly to households, and winning over the undecided voters.
Add to this the BJP’s other advantages—control over the godi media, huge corporate funding, brazen use of State machinery and public funds during elections, and overt as well as covert election manipulation—and the outcome becomes inevitable. It is not surprising that the BJP–Mahayuti swept the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections, winning 235 seats and 49.6% of the vote, while the MVA was left with just 49 seats and 35.3% vote.
The point we are trying to make is that electoral manipulation was only a minor factor in the Congress–MVA’s defeat. The bigger, and most important factor, was the absence of sustained grassroots work by Congress and its allies, in contrast to the year-round disciplined and organised work by BJP–RSS activists.
We can extend this analysis to the recent Bihar Assembly elections.
The RJD–Congress-led Mahagathbandhan (MGB) did not lose merely because the elections were unfair and the NDA indulged in voter manipulation—although both are undoubtedly true. The deeper reason is that the MGB lacked a disciplined, committed grassroots cadre willing to campaign door-to-door making the people aware of the MGB programme and countering the BJP–RSS propaganda. Our limited experience in Bihar, confirmed by discussions with other activists, indicates that MGB workers were largely inactive on the ground.
The Congress–RJD organised a yatra against vote-chori across many districts of Bihar, in which large numbers of party activists participated. The yatra drew large crowds. Buoyed by this, the Congress and RJD leaders assumed they were going to sweep, or at least win, the elections. But once the yatra ended, the enthusiasm among the party workers waned. Lacking dedicated cadre, the election campaign gradually lost steam. A report in the Times of India by Alok Chamaria (“Voter Adhikar Yatra Sparked Hype, But Grand Alliance Failed to Capitalise on Buzz, Say Experts”), dated 11 November 2025, noted:
The much-publicised ‘Vote Adhikar Yatra’ and rally led by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi … was seen as a strong show of organisational strength for the Congress in Bihar. However, as the Assembly election campaign gained pace, that initial fervour has steadily diminished, exposing organisational weaknesses within the Grand Alliance.”
This was written before the counting of votes began. It may be dismissed as being a newsreport carried by a pro-BJP paper. But other newsreports by neutral or pro-Congress observers also make similar observations. Here is a report from The Wire by Sravasti Dasgupta (“Six Key Takeaways from NDA’s Bihar Sweep as BJP Emerges Single Largest Party”) dated 15 November 2025:
while the Congress had built momentum in the State ahead of the elections with the Voter Adhikar Yatra in the aftermath of the special intensive revision, the party was not seen campaigning in the State after it ended.
The conclusion from the above analysis of the elections in both Maharashtra and Bihar is the same: the INDIA alliance will find it difficult to defeat the BJP–RSS without a disciplined cadre grounded in ideological conviction and year-round grassroots work.
The Silver Lining
The silver lining is that, despite doing so little ideological and grassroots work, the MVA still secured nearly 44 percent of the vote in Maharashtra in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and 35.3 percent in the Assembly elections. In the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP’s vote share was nearly the same as the MVA. In the Assembly elections, the BJP was able to swing around 6–7 percent of the undecided voters in its favour over the five months between the two polls, due to its intense five-month booth-level campaign, and this was enough to raise its vote share to 49 percent and sweep the election.
In the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, the total vote share of the NDA alliance [BJP + JD(U) + HAM(S) + VIP + LJP (Ram Vilas) + RLM] was 46.56 percent, while the MGB alliance secured 37.94 percent [rough estimates, from Wikipedia]. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the NDA won 47.23 percent of the vote in Bihar, while the INDIA alliance got 39.21 percent. Thus, between the two elections, the NDA improved its share by about 0.7 percentage points, while the MGB lost around 1.3 points.
This shows that a large number of ordinary people—at least one-third of the voters—support the Constitutional values of democracy, equality, liberty, secularism, fraternity and socialism. They continue to vote for the Congress and the INDIA alliance, even though they may be dissatisfied with the local leaders of these parties for their low ideological commitment, self-centredness and lack of concern for the problems being faced by the common people.
This means the Congress and the INDIA alliance parties need to swing just an additional 7–8 percent of the voters to their side—and they can sweep or at least win the elections, from the Centre to the States. That is not very difficult. In fact, that is the reason why the BJP, despite having a massive and committed RSS cadre base at its disposal, is so scared of the Congress and the INDIA bloc and uses every possible trick to manipulate and win elections.
Give Up Timidity and Fight
For the Congress and the INDIA alliance to win elections, they need to build an ideologically committed cadre base willing to conduct a sustained mass campaign among the people. The BJP has no genuine programme for the people; it relies mainly on communal polarisation, caste mobilisation, and election-time doles such as the Ladki Behana Yojana in Maharashtra and the Mukhya Mantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana (under which Rs 10,000 was transferred to 75 lakh women) in Bihar. Instead of attempting to assemble a counter caste–religion alliance, the INDIA alliance must confront the BJP head-on with a principled, pro-people programme rooted in Constitutional values. Its activists must campaign house-to-house, continuously, on two broad issues:
i) The Congress-INDIA alliance’s Idea of India (as articulated by the leaders of our freedom struggle—Gandhi, Nehru, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Subhas Bose, Maulana Azad, Bhagat Singh and so many others) versus the BJP–RSS conception of India as a Hindu Rashtra.
This includes issues like:
- Spreading the Constitutional values of democracy, equality, secularism, fraternity, liberty and socialism among the people, and making them aware about how the BJP–RSS oppose these principles. Most people are not aware of these values, most have not even heard about the Constitution. So they are unaware of the covert attempts being made by the BJP to change our Constitution, replace it with the Manusmriti, and the danger it poses to the foundations of the Republic. Most Congress and INDIA alliance leaders remain silent on this issue.
- Campaigning among women on patriarchy and the violence on women which results from it, and among the Dalits and OBCs on the hierarchical caste system and caste oppression. The BJP openly supports patriarchy and the caste system. There is no substantive reason for the Dalits, OBCs and women to support the BJP—but the Congress and its allies are not able to mount an effective campaign on these issues because many of their leaders are themselves steeped in patriarchy and casteism.
- Confronting the BJP’s relentless assault on minorities—hate propaganda, communal rewriting of history, open subversion of the Constitutional value of secularism, lynching, bulldozer politics, etc. Congress and INDIA leaders rarely speak on these issues, assuming that Muslims will vote for them anyway, and fearing that taking a principled stand will ‘alienate’ Hindu voters.
ii) Critiquing the BJP’s economic policies:
- Exposing the deep cuts made by the BJP in the Centre’s social sector spending in all sectors—agriculture, education, health, nutrition, pensions, spending on the marginalised sections, and fully Centrally funded programmes like the PDS and MGNREGA. Combined with reduced Central transfer to States, this has resulted in declining quality of welfare services.
- Rahul Gandhi has been boldly speaking about the enormous transfers of public money to corporate houses by the BJP. But most other Congress leaders and INDIA alliance leaders remain silent on this issue. None are willing to demand higher corporate and wealth taxes on the rich to finance an increase in the country’s social sector expenditures. The 2024 Congress Lok Sabha election manifesto was also silent on this. Worse, in every State where the INDIA alliance parties are in power, they hobnob with corporate houses, privatise public sector enterprises and mineral resources, and engage in practices that weaken their credibility. In the eyes of the common people, the INDIA alliance’s economic agenda often appears indistinguishable from the BJP’s.
- The INDIA alliance must raise specific local issues. For example, in Bihar, BJP–JDU leaders and the godi media claimed that the State had seen considerable development under their stewardship. But Bihar ranks near the bottom on almost every social indicator (as Christophe Jaffrelot notes in his article published in The Wire, “The NDA in Bihar: The Paradoxical Victory of Maldevelopment”).
In Bihar, with the exception of Rahul Gandhi, most Congress and RJD leaders avoided campaigning on the ideological issues mentioned above. There was also no systematic critique of the BJP’s economic programme. The entire campaign devolved into a competition of economic promises. The NDA, being in power, was able to give bribes like distributing Rs 10,000 to women. Tejashwi Yadav promised 10 lakh government jobs without explaining how they would be created or funded. The people reposed faith in the NDA—a bird in hand is worth more than two in the bush.
The reason why the MGB’s local leaders and activists remained silent on both ideological and economic issues is because they do not understand these issues, have little concern for the people and lack the commitment needed to mobilise the public around them.
Let Us Learn from Zohram Mamdani’s Victory in New York
An important reason why the INDIA alliance hesitates to take on the BJP head-on—and instead responds with timidity and compromise—is fear: fear of losing upper caste or Hindu votes; fear of losing upper class support; fear of losing corporate funding. In this, there is much to learn from Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary election campaign and his resounding victory in the New York mayoral election.
The leadership of both the Republican and Democratic Parties joined hands against him, alarmed by his Democratic Socialist agenda. President Trump openly campaigned against Mamdani, calling him a ‘jihadist’ and ‘communist’. The corporate-controlled media launched a relentless campaign to vilify him. Billionaires across finance, media, technology, casinos, luxury resorts and real estate—not just from New York but from all over the USA—poured millions into the campaign of his main opponent, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is estimated to have raised between $25 and $50 million, the highest in New York’s history. Though he ran as an independent candidate, he enjoyed the direct or tacit backing of both major parties. Even the incumbent Mayor, Eric Adams, withdrew and endorsed Cuomo to avoid “splitting the anti-Mamdani vote.”
Despite this formidable opposition, Mamdani campaigned fearlessly on his Democratic Socialist programme, trusted the wisdom of the people, and won decisively—securing more than 50 percent of all votes cast.
Here are the key lessons his victory holds for Indian politics:
1. Mamdani’s bold assertion of his Muslim identity, support for immigrants and embrace of diversity:
Muslims constitute less than 7 percent of New York City’s electorate. Anti-Muslim prejudice is widespread across the United States, driven both by global Islamophobia and toxic domestic political rhetoric. Despite this, Mamdani never softened or apologised for his identity. He spoke openly about the hate and threats he and his family received:
“I get messages that say the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.”
Days before the election, he stood outside a mosque and said with tears in his eyes:
“To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity… No more.”
White voters constitute the largest segment of the NYC electorate—around 30–35 percent. There is considerable anti-immigrant sentiment in the USA, intensified in recent years by Donald Trump’s public statements. But Mamdani made no special overtures to white voters, and openly supported immigrants. His message remained clear and inclusive:
“We must stand with immigrant families, working-class communities, and every New Yorker who’s been told they don’t belong—because this city was built by immigrants, and its future belongs to us all.”
He championed dignity—for Black communities, for immigrants, for single mothers, for trans people, for the working poor.
Mamdani went from house-to-house, campaigning among all sections of the electorate, without worrying about how the majority community would react. Fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Spanish and Arabic, he spoke to people in their own languages and released campaign videos in Arabic, Spanish, Urdu and Hindi. He visited mosques, churches, synagogues, temples and gurudwaras.
Even more remarkably, Mamdani openly supported the Palestinian struggle and described Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide—something virtually no mainstream American politician was willing to do. He framed Palestinian rights as a core human-rights issue. Contrast this with the stand of the INDIA alliance parties (except the Left)—who have been timid and muted in their support for Palestine and criticism of the genocide in Gaza, fearing a backlash from Hindu voters.
2. Mamdani’s unabashed support of Democratic Socialism
Mamdani fearlessly identified himself as a Democratic Socialist—something that even Democratic Socialists in America are not very willing to do. That is because in America, ‘socialist’ is still heavily stigmatised. US President Donald Trump and other Republicans promptly branded him a communist. But Mamdani did not flinch. He ran an unapologetic socialist campaign, that included: radical reduction of inequality; a freeze on rents and sweeping tenants’ rights; major expansion of public and social housing; stronger protections for workers; far-reaching reforms to curb police abuses; immigrant rights; universal public services, including free universal childcare from six weeks and city-owned grocery stores to lower food costs; fast, reliable, free public transport; and so much more. To fund this, he explicity campaigned for raising taxes on the rich. Here are snippets from his campaign speeches:
For too long, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. The oligarchs of New York are the wealthiest people in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. They will do everything they can to prevent their grip from weakening.
The truth is simple: each one of us—every working person, the taxi driver, the line cook, the nurse, everyone seeking a life of grace, not greed—deserves freedom.
It would be relevant to point out here that Mamdani’s understanding of socialism mirrors the vision of India’s Constitution, and the ideals of Jawaharlal Nehru whom Mamdani quoted in his victory speech.
3. A powerful grassroots campaign
This was the heart of Mamdani’s success.
When he announced his candidacy in October 2024, he was virtually unknown outside his small working-class district in Queens. Even in February 2025, he was polling only 1 percent.
But all this did not discourage Mamdani. He was a member of the socialist organisation Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose activists were not very organised and active in New York City. He began by motivating and energising them. Within a space of a few months, he had built a grassroots campaign force of 25,000 volunteers; and in another few months, this grew to nearly 1 lakh.
These volunteers went house-to-house across New York City, explaining to people Mamdani’s explicit socialist programme. They knocked on an estimated 30 lakh doors—virtually every house in New York City.
When voting day arrived on November 4, more than 50 percent New Yorkers voted for Mamdani.
[Apart from New York, voters in Seattle also elected community organiser and Democratic Socialist Katie Wilson as Mayor, ousting incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. She credited her win to a volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated. Like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, she too also made universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety and stable, affordable housing among her priorities during her election campaign.]
To Conclude
Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York shows that even the most powerful political machine can be defeated—if it is confronted with courage, clarity, ideological conviction and disciplined grassroots organisation.
It shows that it is possible for the INDIA alliance to defeat the BJP–RSS juggernaut in the coming Lok Sabha and State elections. But to do so, it must:
- Learn the right lessons from Bihar and Maharashtra: Reflect honestly on its organisational weaknesses, campaign failures and lack of grassroots engagement.
- Draw inspiration and courage from our history: Gandhi, Nehru, Babasaheb Ambedkar and countless other freedom fighters inspired a broken, caste-ridden, religion-divided, gender-oppressed, scared, exploited and starving people—whose spirit had been crushed by two centuries of brutal British rule—to rise up for freedom.
- Reclaim the ideals that united India: Our freedom movement united crores of people under the values of justice, equality, liberty, secularism and fraternity—values later enshrined in our Constitution. These ideals need to be reclaimed today.
- Build a truly inclusive India: Strive to build an India that belongs equally to people of every faith, caste, gender and language—an India that guarantees to all its people universal, good-quality education and healthcare, decent housing, nutritious food, dignity and security in old age …
[Neeraj Jain is a social activist and writer. He is the convenor of Lokayat, an activist group based in Pune. He is also the editor of Janata Weekly, India’s oldest socialist magazine. He has authored several books, including Globalisation or Recolonisation?, Education Under Globalisation: Burial of the Constitutional Dream, Nuclear Energy: Technology from Hell, and most recently, Union Budgets 2014–24: An Analysis.]
