As voting begins, attacks on the Muslim frontrunner’s religious identity have come from both Democrats and Republicans in the US.

On Friday, Zohran Mamdani stood outside a mosque in the Bronx borough of New York City and delivered an emotional speech addressing racist attacks from his opponents. The 33-year-old is the Democratic Party’s official nominee in New York City’s mayoral race and leads recent polls with 44% support. If elected on November 4, he would become the first Muslim and first South Asian mayor of America’s largest city.

But his candidacy has sparked Islamophobic rhetoric from politicians from both the Democratic and Republican Party and has dominated the final weeks of the campaign.

Two days before early voting began on October 25, Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor now running as an independent candidate appeared on a conservative radio show where host Sid Rosenberg suggested Mamdani would be “cheering” if another September 11-like terrorist attack occurred. Cuomo laughed and responded, “That’s another problem.”

Cuomo had lost to Mamdani in the Democratic primary election in June.

At a joint press conference endorsing Cuomo, outgoing Mayor Eric Adams – who faces federal corruption charges – warned: “You see what’s playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism. Not Muslims – let’s not mix this up – but those Islamic extremists that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany.”

Even US Vice President JD Vance of the Republican Party joined in. After Mamdani tearfully recounted how his aunt stopped taking the subway after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “because she did not feel safe in her hijab”, Vance mocked him on social media: “According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some [allegedly] bad looks.”

Speaking to ABC News, Mamdani said: “It is sadly unsurprising, but still shocking to see the vice president of this country try and make a cheap joke about Islamophobia when what New Yorkers want is a vision of a city that can come together.”

Mehdi Hasan, the British-American journalist and editor of the media outlet Zeteo, criticised Vance on social media. “Imagine being married to a brown woman and having mixed-race kids and then publicly mocking other brown people as they talk publicly and emotionally about their experience of racism. Vance is just a bad person,” he said.

Vance is married to Usha Vance, whose parents immigrated from India.

Mamdani has also faced calls of deportation after Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, sent several letters to the US Department of Justice calling for an investigation into Mamdani’s citizenship in June.

Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of Indian origin – his mother is the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, known for movies such as Mississippi Masala, and his father is academic Mahmood Mamdani. The family moved to New York when Zohran was seven years old, and he became a U.S. citizen in 2018.

Research by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington-based research organisation, tracked an explosion of anti-Muslim rhetoric following Mamdani’s primary victory in June. Nearly 40% of the 6,669 posts studied by the thinktank contained explicit anti-Muslim attacks targeting Mamdani, Muslims generally or Islam.

Posts that combined religious attacks with political ones – like “Islamist socialism taking New York City” – were shared widely, averaging 406,244 interactions each.

In recent weeks, racist AI-generated ads have circulated depicting a dystopian future in New York under Mamdani’s leadership. One ad showed Muslim men praying on roads blocking traffic, pointing guns in a park at a queer group, and throwing stones.

Separately, on October 22, Cuomo’s campaign posted an AI-generated video showing a Black man putting on a keffiyeh – a traditional Palestinian scarf – before shoplifting from a store and declaring himself a “criminal for Mamdani”. The video also shows other people identified as “criminals,” including a “drug dealer” and a man at a pro-Palestine protest.

The video mocked Mamdani for eating rice with his hands, a common practice across South Asia and the Middle East. Cuomo deleted the video but it was reposted online by journalist Prem Thakker and it has been widely condemned for its racist depictions.

Hindutva groups back Cuomo

The campaign against Mamdani has also drawn support from Hindutva groups, both in the United States and in India.

In July, when a Hindutva influencer from India named Kajal Shingala addressed an audience in Edison, New Jersey, she called Mamdani a “jihadi zombie” and a “new demon”.

Harshad Patel, president of the Gujarati Samaj, defended Shingala as “a good speaker for Hinduism” and said that as “a Hindu” he should “promote her”. Adams had been scheduled to appear at the event but quietly withdrew after criticism from interfaith groups.

The event in Edison was co-sponsored by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, the Coalition of Hindus of North America and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the US wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the Coalition of Hindus of North America.

Patel of the Gujarati Samaj, who had earlier been supporting Adams in the mayoral race, shifted support to Cuomo and hosted a “South Asians for Cuomo” campaign event at a Gujarati Samaj community hall in Flushing Meadows on October 19. Patel was quoted in the campaign’s press release praising Cuomo for standing up for “immigrant and working-class communities like ours”.

The opposition from Hindu nationalist groups came after Mamdani described Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “war criminal” at a public event in May. He was referring to the 2002 riots in the Indian state of Gujarat that killed more than a thousand people, predominantly Muslim. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time and was denied a US visa in the aftermath of the violence for “severe violations of religious freedom”.

Mamdani has argued that his critiques of Modi’s policies do not make him “anti-Hindu”. “I’m proud to be an Indian American and my critiques of policies and politics can be made while still feeling that same level of pride,” he said.

He added: “My Indian heritage means a lot to me. It’s a big part of who I am, and how I see the world, and even just thinking about the preamble to the Indian Constitution, it informed so much of what I think so many deserve.”

New York has about 1 million Muslims (there are no official numbers tallied for religious groups), which is about the same as the number of Jews in the city. The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimated that around 350,000 Muslims are registered to vote though only about 12% voted in the 2021 mayoral election.

But this appears to be changing since Muslim and South Asian voter turnout in the Democratic mayoral primary in June was higher than in 2021.

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