The crowd at the Indian Independence Day celebration in Bellerose, Queens, on Aug. 16 formed an impromptu queue for photos when Zohran Mamdani arrived. Within minutes, the Democratic mayoral nominee was moving through the gathering, switching between English and Hindi as he posed for selfies with supporters.
It had been two months since his stunning primary victory over Andrew Cuomo, and Mamdani appeared to be as popular as ever in the city’s South Asian neighborhoods.
Shingala was recorded among India’s most active hate speech provocateurs in 2023 by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a Washington-based think tank. She has multiple cases registered against her in India for inciting violence. Her appearance has represented a new phase of fringe attacks against Mamdani, despite these groups’ inability to prevent his primary victory.
Kayla Bassett, the director of research at CSOH, said the broader campaign involved far-right groups in the U.S., Israel and India spreading Islamophobic narratives about Mamdani on social media. CSOH analyzed public posts over seventeen days around Mamdani’s primary win in June. They found popular social media accounts labeling him a “jihadi” and Hindu nationalist accounts in both the United States and India posting at least 65 messages calling Mamdani “anti-Hindu.”