By Dr Mohammad Nakibur Rahman
I’ve never lived in New York City, but I’ve walked its streets enough to know them like a second skin.
My first encounter with America was through the fluorescent corridors of JFK Airport. In the years since, New York has been my compass–brash, beautiful, brutal. A place where ambition is oxygen and identity is always on trial.
I arrived just weeks before September 11. By November, the illusion of safety had cracked. Driving down the FDR, a man in the next lane spat at our car and flipped us off–for no apparent reason except that my friend’s wife was wearing a hijab.
That was my welcome to the new American normal: open hostility, casual hate, and Islamophobia dressed in the language of patriotism. Even in so-called progressive New York.
That’s why what just happened in this city is nothing short of revolutionary.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary isn’t just a political upset. It’s a rupture. A direct challenge to every whispered warning and blatant barrier that has told people like me: you don’t belong, not really.
It’s a message to the establishment that power is not destiny–and that identity, when owned unapologetically, can be a force rather than a liability.
For months, I watched the panic set in. I spoke to insiders, donors, party operatives. In January, they told me no Muslim could win New York–not in a city still shadowed by 9/11.
In February, they said no candidate with pro-Palestine politics stood a chance in a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. In March, they laughed off his digital following as noise that wouldn’t translate into votes.
Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo–the former governor and son of another–was coronated by big business, labor unions, and the media ecosystem that has long mistook access for insight.
They said Mamdani had a ceiling. Five percent. Ten if he was lucky. They were wrong.
The rise of an underdog
His victory is a reckoning–a reminder that New York’s myth of progressive exceptionalism has long been padded with exclusions. And that sometimes, the underdog doesn’t just survive; he rewrites the rules.
Watching this race unfold from the U.S., I couldn’t help but think of my country of birth: Bangladesh.
The parallels are striking. There too, political dynasties grip power. There too, religion is weaponized, identity policed. But in both places, the public has proven more imaginative–and more courageous–than the pundits.
Mamdani punctured a story we’ve been told for decades: that only certain people are electable, only certain lives are acceptable. That myth is crumbling. And not just in New York.
At first glance, the comparison may sound implausible–New York City and Dhaka? The United States and Bangladesh? Different continents, different systems, different stakes.
But scratch the surface, and the parallels are impossible to ignore.
New York City’s electorate is a political kaleidoscope: 36 percent foreign-born, 85 percent citizens. Jews make up roughly 11 percent of the population but often account for more than 20 percent of primary voters–tending to favor establishment candidates.
Muslims, now close to 9 percent of the city, are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Arab world, and West Africa. Their politics lean progressive.
Latino and Asian communities round out a coalition that reflects the global majority. To win in New York, you must navigate complexity–build across lines of race, faith, class, and memory.
And yet, Andrew Cuomo’s reentry into politics was treated more as a coronation than a real campaign. Armed with name recognition, institutional power, and limitless capital, he was the default–no questions asked.
Michael Bloomberg bankrolled his super PAC. The Clintons lined up. Labor unions fell into place. Legacy media ran interference. It was the full machinery of the establishment–preprogrammed and uncritical.
Now, swap out Cuomo for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Replace New York with Dhaka. You’ll see the pattern.
Where lies the similarities?
In Bangladesh, the business and media elite have already anointed the BNP as the next governing force, despite its fractured base and uninspiring ground game.
Their alleged backers–corporate behemoths like Bashundhara Group, certain pro-India political interests, and establishment media like The Daily Star and Prothom Alo–are the local equivalents of Bloomberg, CNN, and The New York Times editorial board.
The choreography is eerily familiar: candidates chosen by elites, narratives managed from above, dissent flattened.
And just like Mamdani, others are told they don’t belong in the official story.
In Bangladesh, that role is possibly played by Jamaat-e-Islami. Despite significant grassroots support and a long record of social mobilization, the party is systematically excluded from mainstream discourse.
Branded as beyond the pale. Unworthy of legitimacy. Mamdani’s opponents deployed 9/11 as a political weapon; Jamaat’s critics reach for 1971.
Mamdani was told he couldn’t criticize Israel. Jamaat is told it cannot criticize India. The logic is the same: to dissent is to disqualify.
Yet Mamdani ran a masterclass in what insurgent politics should look like–data-driven, community-rooted, ideologically unapologetic.
He refused to flinch. And that, more than anything, is the takeaway: winning is not a gift from power. It is the outcome of relentless organizing, disciplined messaging, and moral clarity.
That lesson applies as much in Queens as it does in Dhaka.
Tonight, Mamdani’s victory isn’t his alone. It belongs to every community that’s been sidelined, sneered at, or written out of the script by those who claim the authority to define “electability.”
It’s a rebuke to the political class’s favorite myth: that early money, media muscle, and insider endorsements equal inevitability.
They don’t.
In a real democracy, there are no presumptive winners—only votes yet to be cast, voices yet to be heard.
We’d do well to remember a verse from the Qur’an, Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:249: “How often has a small group overcome a mighty army by the will of God. And God is with the steadfast.”
Let that be a message to New Yorkers. To Bangladeshis. To anyone who’s ever been told they’re too different, too foreign, too inconvenient to lead: Your time is coming. Just don’t let them crown the winner before your vote is counted.
Dr Mohammad Nakibur Rahman is a professor of Finance at University of North Carolina. This story was published by Bangla Outlook, which covers the Bangladeshi American community. It is republished here with permission.
