Zohran Mamdani, Indian American Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City has landed on Time’s new cover with the magazine, recognizing how he “has gone from local long shot to likely mayor of America’s biggest city.”
The son of of Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, who would be the city’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor, himself looks at it as “a surreal experience to find myself on the cover of cover of @time.” But “it’s truly a reflection of all the work we’ve done together over the past ten months to bring us to this moment,” he wrote on Instagram.
The democratic socialist and backbench state assemblyman Mamdani tells Time in an interview he wants to be a mayor who breaks down barriers between politicians and the public.
“I think the most important thing is that people see themselves and their struggles in your campaign,’ he is quoted as saying. “And I think the larger struggle for us as Democrats is to ensure that we are practicing a politics that is direct, a politics of no translation, a politics that when you read the policy commitment, you understand it, as how it applies to your life.’”
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Before 2025, basically no one knew who Mamdani was, notes Time. “Over the course of eight months, the democratic socialist and backbench state assemblyman went from local long shot to likely mayor of America’s biggest city.”
“Suddenly he is a main character in national politics—the ubiquitous subject of cable news segments, a lightning rod on the left and right. Senior Democrats have weighed in for and against him,” it says.
“President Donald Trump has pioneered a dark new birtherism by questioning his immigration status and floating his possible arrest,” Time recalled. “To many progressives, his style of politics—principled, pocketbook-focused, and online—was an electrifying answer for a moribund party.”
In interviews with more than 30 lawmakers, political figures, supporters, friends, and critics, Mamdani emerges as both more interesting and more complicated than the caricatures suggest, according to Time.
“He is a very eloquent, very young man who is both less experienced than his predecessors and more gifted than almost any of his peers at connecting with the party’s voters,” it says.
“He is an ideologue interested in creative solutions, less radical than painted when you dig into his policy proposals and yet more sincere in his left-wing ambitions,” Time says calling him “a movement politician who won by being in touch with the streets, and who must now cloister himself inside as he prepares for the business of governing, not betraying the people by not failing them.
“The prospect of Mamdani’s mayoralty scandalized many of New York’s power brokers, some of whom vowed to stop him in the November general election,” Time noted.
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“It also alarmed many national Democrats, who see Mamdani’s politics—his past support for defunding the police, his criticism of Israel and defense of the Palestinian cause, his proposals for city-owned grocery stores and higher taxes on the wealthy—as a dangerous step left for a party searching for its footing in the Trump era,” it said.
Mamdani, who became a U.S. citizen in 2018, was raised in Uganda, South Africa, and New York by public-facing parents: Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of postcolonialism who landed at Columbia University, and filmmaker Mira Nair, an Academy Award nominee who has directed such luminaries as Denzel Washington.
“In a sense he does come from a showbiz family,” Amitav Ghosh, a Man Booker Prize–shortlisted writer and friend of Nair’s is quoted as saying. From his father, Ghosh says, Mamdani took “his very deep commitment to social justice,” and from his mother, an “incredible energy” and “fine aesthetic sense.”
His charmed upbringing instilled the stage presence that aided an amateur rapping career, plus opportunities like working on music in his mother’s film “Queen of Katwe” and getting celebrities Madhur Jaffrey and Lupita Nyong’o to appear in his music videos, according to Time.