From biryani to Bharat: How Zohran Mamdani is cooking up chaos, falsehood and division

Culture wars have found a bizarre new battleground — the humble plate of biryani. The trigger? Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, eating mutton biryani with his hands. Overnight, social media was ablaze with a debate on what was the correct way to eat the delicacy: with hands or via cutlery. A significantly large section of people residing in the west of the Atlantic, ironically home to the slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good”, rose in fierce defence of cutlery, while many in the East, especially the metropolitans of Bharat — who for decades shamed hand-eating at prestigious venues — rediscovered pride in eating with fingers.

This absurd battle reveals more than just culinary quirks. It exposes how identity can be weaponised, narratives twisted, and facts bent, all to feed divisive politics. And Zohran Mamdani stands right at this dangerous intersection, appropriating symbolic gestures to project a progressive persona while camouflaging his illiberal, divisive, and grievance-driven agenda.

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Let’s start with his rise. Mamdani, the son of a cerebral filmmaker mother and a socialist academic father, is celebrated in New York’s political-socialite circles as a beacon of progressivism; he is hailed for championing the cause of the supposedly voiceless. Yet, scratch beneath this carefully constructed image, and a troubling pattern emerges: exaggeration, fabrication and, worse, a dangerous tendency to manufacture convenient truth.

Last month, the 33-year-old Mamdani called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “war criminal” who orchestrated a “mass slaughter of Muslims”. The result: “There are no Muslims left in Gujarat,” he claims. This is indeed a sweeping, chilling assertion — except that they both are blatant, dangerous lies.

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While Prime Minister Modi is a democratically elected leader of the world’s largest democracy — not once but three times in a row — Gujarat remains home to over seven million Muslims, nearly 10 per cent of the state’s population. Far from being wiped out, Gujarat’s Muslims today run 22 per cent of the state’s small and medium enterprises, despite forming just 9 per cent of the population. The Tendulkar Committee, set up by the previous Congress-led UPA government, found that only 7.7 per cent of Gujarat’s rural Muslims lived below the poverty line — this is phenomenally better than the national average of 26.9 per cent. The Sachar Committee too acknowledged that Gujarat’s welfare schemes extended robust support to Muslim communities.

Equally significant is what Mamdani doesn’t say. Gujarat, once notorious for periodic communal riots (1969, 1985, 1987, 1992, to name a few), has not seen a single major communal violence in more than two decades. The Supreme Court, after exhaustive investigations, gave Narendra Modi a clean chit in the 2002 post-Godhra violence. But inconvenient truths find no place in Mamdani’s narrative. His story needs villains, not nuanced facts. This also explains why he would repeatedly talk about Gujarat, but Godhra would be conspicuous by its absence in his statements.

Mamdani wears his opposition to “Hindutva forces” like a badge of honour, constantly highlighting the plight of minorities (for him, and so many Left-‘liberals’, minority means Muslim) in Bharat. He is seen to be routinely criticising Bharat’s democratic credentials, calling it on multiple occasions a state teetering toward fascism. Yet, he has nothing to say on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits or the political violence faced by Hindus in West Bengal. The sorry state of minority affairs in Bharat’s immediate neighbourhood—Pakistan and Bangladesh — rarely bothers him.

Even his association with Khalistani elements in the West doesn’t bother him. He is more than happy to overlook their history of violence — from the Air India Kanishka bombing in 1985, which was the deadliest aviation terror attack before 9/11, to the bombings of Hindu temples across North America in recent years.

Why would a New York politician be so invested in demonising Bharat? The answer is as simple as it is cynical. By painting Bharat as a Hindu majoritarian dystopia and Modi as a villain, Mamdani secures instant celebrity status and applause from the global Left-‘liberal’ ecosystem. What would otherwise require years of grassroots work — conducting mass outreach programmes, building coalitions, and delivering local results — he achieves overnight by positioning himself as a moral crusader against the alleged fascism in a faraway land.

This is narrative politics at its most dangerous. It thrives on half-truths, selective empathy, and historical amnesia. Worse, it is designed to perpetuate victimhood. Mamdani’s real genius lies not in policy, but in optics. Whether eating biryani with his hands or issuing sweeping pronouncements on another country’s internal affairs, he has mastered the art of narrative over substance. It is a reel persona overtaking the real one — a carefully curated act designed to harvest outrage and votes.

Zohran Mamdani’s blood may be Bharatiya, and he may relish a plate of biryani with his hands, but his mind seems consumed by disdain for Bharat and its civilisational/Sanatana identity — an idea far more inclusive and diverse than the bleak picture he paints. In the end, the real tragedy is not that a local politician in New York peddles convenient falsehoods and manufactured truths. It is that in doing so, he keeps real wounds from healing, real conversations from happening, and more importantly, real democracies from flowering.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.