Mamdani Isn't Being Hypocritical About the RSS. He's Doing Something Harder — and More Honest.

The obvious take on Mamdani opposing the RSS chief while campaigning as "the first Indian American mayor" is that it's a contradiction. I think that take mistakes two very different kinds of identity politics for the same thing — and the mistake matters.

The Easy Criticism, Stated Fairly

Here's the charge, and I want to state it in its strongest form before I push back on it: Zohran Mamdani built real political capital out of being New York's first Indian-American mayor — his heritage was part of his story, part of his appeal, part of how he connected with a diaspora electorate. Now he's using that same identity — "my mother's family is all still in India" — to publicly oppose a Hindu-American cultural gathering headlined by the RSS chief. Critics see a man who leans on ethnic identity when it helps him and disavows a version of that same community's own religious-cultural expression when it doesn't fit his politics. On its face, that looks like having it both ways.

Why I Think That's the Wrong Diagnosis

I don't think this holds up, and the reason is that it collapses two genuinely different things into one category simply because they both involve "being Indian." Identity as belonging and identity as ideology are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is exactly the move that makes majoritarian nationalist movements — in India, and everywhere else they exist — so effective at deflecting criticism.

Mamdani invoking his family's roots in India when he talks about pluralism is a claim about *belonging* — an assertion that he has standing to speak about what India is and could be, because his own family lives that reality. Opposing the RSS is a claim about *ideology* — a specific, substantive disagreement with an organization whose founding vision and historical record, as documented by serious historians on multiple sides of the debate, center on Hindu nationalist cultural and political dominance rather than the pluralistic, multi-religious vision of Indian identity Mamdani says he was raised with. These are not two versions of the same identity politics in tension with each other. They're a claim of belonging being used to make a specific ideological argument — which is not a contradiction, it's just how political speech about one's own heritage normally works.

The Comparison That Clarifies This

Try the same logic on an American example and the supposed contradiction mostly evaporates. An American politician who says "I'm proud to be from the South, my family's been here for generations" and then separately criticizes a specific political organization active in the South isn't being inconsistent about Southern identity — they're distinguishing between a place and heritage they claim, and a specific political movement operating within that heritage they reject. Nobody would call that hypocrisy; they'd call it exactly what politics involving heritage usually looks like — people staking a claim to a shared identity precisely *in order to* argue about what that identity should mean, rather than ceding the definition to whichever organized political movement currently claims to speak for it loudest.

The RSS's own defenders would, I think, actually agree with this distinction if you asked them directly — they'd say the RSS represents the correct interpretation of Hindu and Indian identity, and Mamdani represents a wrong one. That's a real disagreement about what Indian and Hindu identity should mean. It is not evidence that Mamdani doesn't understand what identity is.

Where the Real Tension Actually Is

That said, I don't think Mamdani's position is free of tension entirely — I just think the tension is different from, and more interesting than, the "hypocrisy" charge. The real tension is this: Mamdani has acknowledged publicly that New York City likely lacks the authority to stop a legal, privately organized event at a privately operated venue — which means his opposition is, by his own account, a statement of political and moral position rather than an exercise of the actual power his office holds. That's a legitimate thing for a mayor to do. But it does raise a fair question about proportion and precedent: how often, and on what basis, should an elected official use the platform of their office to publicly weigh in against a legally protected religious and cultural gathering they have no authority to stop? If the answer is "whenever the mayor personally finds the organizing group's ideology objectionable," that's a standard that will eventually be applied by mayors whose ideological objections Mamdani's own coalition would find much less sympathetic.

I don't think that possibility makes Mamdani wrong to have spoken up here — I think his specific criticism of the RSS's historical record is substantively defensible, and elected officials are allowed to have and voice political opinions about organizations, foreign or domestic, without that constituting an abuse of office. But I do think supporters of his stance should be honest that the precedent being set — mayor publicly opposes a legal private gathering on ideological grounds — is a genuinely double-edged one, not a costless one.

Why This Distinction Matters Beyond Mamdani Specifically

The reason I'm spending this much time on what might look like a narrow semantic point is that I think the "identity politics is identity politics, pick a lane" framing is actually doing real damage to how these debates get discussed more broadly. It's the exact same collapsing move that lets majoritarian movements everywhere claim that *any* form of minority pride or heritage-based political appeal is secretly the same thing they're doing — just aimed at a different group. If a Muslim-American politician invoking their faith to argue for religious pluralism gets treated as equivalent, rhetorically, to a religious-nationalist movement invoking the same faith to argue for religious dominance, then the word "identity politics" has stopped doing any useful analytical work at all — it's just become a way to flatten a substantive disagreement about content into an accusation about form.

Mamdani claiming Indian heritage to argue for a pluralistic vision of what India should be, and the RSS claiming Hindu and Indian heritage to argue for a more singular one, are not the same move wearing different colors. They're the actual disagreement — the one worth having — and I'd rather see it argued on those terms than dismissed as two sides of the same "playing the identity card."

Where I think the critics have a fair point regardless: There is a legitimate question about how comfortable Americans generally should be with any elected US official — of any background — publicly campaigning against a legal foreign religious or cultural figure's private US visit, separate from whether that official's underlying criticism is substantively correct; norms around that kind of mayoral advocacy are genuinely underdeveloped, and Mamdani's own supporters would likely object if a future mayor used the same tool against a religious or cultural figure they admired.