Two days before New York City Democrats went to the polls to select their mayoral nominee in June, a plane flew over the Statue of Liberty trailing a banner attacking the race’s front-runner, Zohran Mamdani.
“Save NYC from global intifada,” it read in letters five feet high. “Reject Mamdani.”
The banner, seemingly aimed at the city’s Jewish voters, touched on the campaign’s most charged foreign policy issue: Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel. But the group behind it wasn’t Jewish or Israeli. Its members are Indian-American Hindus, who accuse Mr. Mamdani of pushing an anti-Hindu and anti-Indian agenda.
For years, Mr. Mamdani, a Muslim, has assailed the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a populist whose political ideology inextricably links nationalism with Hinduism at the expense of the country’s Muslim minority.
Mr. Mamdani in May called the prime minister a “war criminal.” Previously, he lobbied to stop Mr. Modi from visiting New York, and demanded that a state assemblywoman return campaign contributions from Indian Americans whom he characterized as “Hindu fascists.”
While campaigning for the State Assembly in 2020, Mr. Mamdani attended a demonstration in Times Square at which a group protesting the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a onetime mosque in India chanted, “Who are Hindus? Bastards!”
Mr. Mamdani has never publicly condemned those remarks, and his campaign declined to comment when asked about them.
