New York City Sees a Surge of Political Candidates Among South Asian Americans
Shaped by their unique experiences growing up in what many see as a marginalized community, several; South Asian Americans jumped into the City Council race to get a seat in office and become a voice for a growing community.
On a nippy afternoon on April 25, Jaslin Kaur, donning a purple sweater and a pair of business pants, addressed a group of about 50 people at Martin Van Buren High School, in Queens Village, Queens. Volunteers representing the borough’s famously diverse mix of ethnicities slowly gathered while wearing face masks, some carrying placards and sporting campaign T-shirts. Flyers were handed out, badges were pinned, sub-groups for different quadrants of the neighborhood were formed, and the canvassing was about to begin.
Kaur, a 25-year-old graduate student, with innocence in her make-up free eyes, and determination on her face, took center stage. The crowd chanted loudly in response to Kaur.
“I am somebody and I won’t be stopped by nobody!” she shouted with a hint of a Queens accent.
“I got my fist in the air!’
“I got movement in my feet!”
“I got love for my people!”
and it starts with me!”
The crowd grew louder with every chant. Then Kaur got down to business.
“We’re not at a point in this election cycle anymore where we’re asking for dollars, we are not asking for petition signatures, we’re asking for people’s votes,” Kaur said. “And we are asking for people to join a movement that’s going to change Eastern Queens well beyond this ballot in 2021.” Armed with water bottles and sneakers, the volunteers braced for a long day of door-knocking to get Kaur’s name out for her run to the New York City Council.
In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first biracial vice president of the United States. Of African American and South Asian ethnicity (her mother was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica). She was also the first woman to enter the office. Six months later, the New York city local politics witnessed an upsurge in South Asian American candidates for City Council. While candidates across various districts in all five boroughs prepare to get their name out and garner votes, Queens, home to the largest population of the city’s South Asian residents, is seeing a change in its political landscape. The Yellow Taxi medallion market crash in recent years and decades of what they say is the negligence of working-class immigrants became the apex of political mobilization among the South Asian diaspora in New York City, spurring a generation of new politicians like Jaslin Kaur, Felicia Singh, Amit Bagga, Moumita Ahmed, and Shahana Hanif to run for the City Council in New York.
These candidates are first-generation children of immigrant parents who came to New York with dreams and hopes of a better life. With roughly 300,000 people of South Asian descent living in New York City, representing approximately 4 per cent of the city’s population, this group is largely underrepresented on the City Council. With term limits creating 32 open seats in the upcoming 2021 elections for New York City Council, the office may for the first time see a diverse representation.
In Amerasia Journal, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes research on Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Pawan Dhingra, Professor of American Studies at Amherst College, explained why celebrities and everyday South Asians happily claimed that “one of us” and someone “who looks like me” entered the White House, in his article “What It Means to Claim Kamala Harris as ‘One of Us’.”
However, Professor Doug Muzzio, a specialist in American public opinion, voting behavior and city politics, and current chief pollster at Baruch College Survey Research, says the surge in South Asian political candidates was inevitable and not necessarily spurred by Vice President Harris, a view shared by other political observers.
“As a rule, immigrant communities become more engaged in politics as the first generation gives way to the second, the second to the third, and so on,” said professor David Birdsell, Dean of Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. “With large South Asian communities in Queens now emerging into the second generation and beyond, it is not surprising that we are seeing a surge of candidates,” he said.
The infrastructural boom in Queens with the establishment of New York City’s LaGuardia and Kennedy international airports attracted migrants in the 20th century. The pivotal Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 established a comprehensive immigration policy that drew skilled labor to the United States. Consequently, the next four decades changed the demographic of the American population and the ethnic configuration of Queens communities and neighborhoods. South Asians, predominantly consisting of Sikhs and Muslims hailing from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, soon settled in this borough of New York City.
“In their own countries, they are often violent enemies, but, in New York City, you find that there are surprising levels of cooperation across these nationalities and ethnic groups,” said Professor Muzzio. discussing the geopolitical partition of British India in 1947 that gave birth to Pakistan and subsequently the formation of Bangladesh after the war of 1971.
This history influenced Kaur’s decision to run for District 23 in Eastern Queens and try to succeed term-limited Barry Grodenchik.
“For me as a South Asian, I think it’s really important to me as a Sikh Punjabi, given that we’ve seen so much violence in our history, from the partition between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also in the Sikh history, in the Sikh tradition of making sure that nobody else is left behind,” she said.
New York City Taxi Medallion Crisis and Its Political Aftermath
Kaur had just begun college in 2014. Raised by Sikh Punjabi immigrants in Glen Oaks, Queens, she was thrilled to enter New York University, hoping to make it first as an engineer, before switching to law so she could free her parents from years of hard work as a taxi driver and a grocery store worker. At the market’s peak, according to the National Credit Union Administration, the New York City taxi medallion price exceeded $1.2 million, which must be paid in a lump sum. The taxi medallion market crashed in 2014 in the middle of her freshman year.,
Seeking a secure life, many taxi drivers emptied their bank accounts, undertook hefty loans, and invested in the taxi medallion, a transferable permit that allows taxi drivers to operate.
In New York City, taxicabs are of two varieties: yellow and green. The yellow cab, or the medallion taxis, gives the driver the liberty to pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. From 2006 to 2014, the medallion values were gradually rising. And by 2014, the medallion market crashed and burst the bubble into fragments of debts for taxi drivers.
In the early 2000s, many taxi drivers took out loans to purchase medallions. These medallions were sold at inflated prices driven upward by exploitative lenders. The advent of Uber and Lyft, app-based for-hire cabs, upended the medallion market. Forcing the value of the medallions to under $200,000 Unable to pay the loans, the crash stripped the immigrant workers of their life savings and crushed them under the weight of massive debts, leading to a string of catastrophic suicides in 2017 and 2018.
“The city of New York has blood on its hands when it comes to the deaths of nearly a dozen taxi drivers who have committed suicide,” said Amit Bagga, a native New Yorker of South Asian ethnicity and son to Indian immigrant parents from India who is running for City Council District 26.
Overnight, Kaur’s family was put under massive debt with not enough income to afford the hefty tuition of a private institution. Several drivers committed suicide due to similar hardships.
About 9.3 miles away, Felicia Singh, a resident of Ozone Park, Queens, shoulders the burden of a similar debt that had a catastrophic impact on her family. Grappling to pay the medallion loan after the market crash seven years ago, her father filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Living with the fear of becoming homeless at any time, the family was devastated when the bankruptcy court put a “For Sale” sign on their home.
“It was terrifying. It was a terrible experience,” said Singh, a South Asian American candidate running for city council in District 32 of Queens.
When a New Yorker hails a yellow taxi in Manhattan, often the driver pulling up to the curb will be a South Asian man According to the 2019 Annual Report by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, nearly 46.5 per cent of the drivers in New York are South Asian, originating from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The platoon of South Asian drivers is a reflection of the proliferating immigration population in New York City. In search of a better life, these individuals who migrated from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1980s and 90s, are now a vital constituent of New York City’s demographics.
However, many of them lacked professional qualifications and resorted to traditional immigrant jobs of a shopkeeper or a taxi driver.
District 32 of Queens includes Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Howard Beach and a majority of Rockaways. A teacher by profession, Singh joined the race for the City Council this February and is running to replace term-limited Eric Ulrich. So far, she has secured over 30 endorsements from groups like the New York Working Families Party, Sunrise Movement, The Jewish Vote, Professional Staff Congress CUNY, and Women of Color for Progress.
“This is not something that I had set out in life to do, this is something that happened,” Singh said “I am really proud to be on this journey and hopefully being a representative of my community that raised me.”
Her 66-year-old father, Dalip Singh, bought the taxi medallion for $250,000 in 1998, an astronomical amount for the family, which had only been in the country for almost a decade. Eventually, Singh suffered a stroke and this setback led him to borrow $750,000 against the medallion’s value in 2014, signing away his right to fight back in court due to the inability to keep up with the payments. According to Singh, her father defaulted on the loan in 2016 and struggled to support the family of five. Soon the surge of Uber and Lyft in New York City fueled cut-throat competition and minimal business. Barely making less than $10 per hour, Singh struggled to pay his monthly loan payment of $3,200. In 2019, the family filed for bankruptcy and had their medallion seized. According to Felicia Singh, they ultimately settled but are deeper in debt today.
Singh supports the New York Taxi Workers Alliance Plan created by New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a taxi union in New York City, which asks the lenders to restructure medallion debts to $125,000 and refinance for no more than 20 years at $757 per month at the interest rate of 4 per cent. However, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a $65 million relief fund for taxi owners, that offers 0% interest loans of up to $20,000 to use as a down payment to assist in restructuring medallion debt, and up to $9,000 in no-interest loans to make as many as six-monthly loan payments of $1,500.
“He chose another plan, that makes no sense and costs our city more money,” Singh said “That doesn’t help people when you have very high debt. I hope to be in the City Council to reverse this.”
Singh grew up in a household that lived from one paycheck to another. Her father came from Punjab, India and her mother hailed from Guyana in South America. They met in the early 1980s in New York and eventually settled down in Queens. Growing up in her district, Felicia recollects her childhood mostly of playing outdoors in a tight-knit community.
“You knew everyone in your block, you knew everyone across the street, you knew everyone’s names, you went to school with them,” Singh said.
She recalls a time when her sister was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 8 years. Her mother decided to stop working and her father became the sole breadwinner of the family. Curtailed to one income, her family struggled to pay bills and rent. She felt helpless watching her sister’s battle cancer, while her parents toiled to make ends meet. That’s when her community, schools, and neighbors, put together a fundraiser that helped her family pay bills. The fundraiser was more than successful and raised enough money for the family to buy their current home in Ozone Park, Singh said.
“I tell that story often because, when I say my community raised me, they kept us here and they kept us funded and cared for, ‘’ said Singh. “That’s why I’m running for office too because I want to be able to build that back and give back to my community what they gave me.”
As the first college graduate in her family, Singh also advocates for equitable education in the New York City public school system and believes in structuring this through an anti-racist approach. Her education policy extends from 3-K and pre-K to higher education. Expanding on the plan by Racially Just Public Schools, a citywide education justice coalition led by parents, students, advocates and educators who aim to put racial equity at the center of policy and budget decisions, Singh plans to implement a culturally responsive anti-racist curriculum for students who identify as LGBTQIA+, as well as those who are undocumented and children of color, among others.
“Teaching takes persistence, dedication, and loyalty. Most importantly, teaching is a political act-it is an act of social justice,” writes Singh on her campaign website, which calls for at least 1,000 more 3-K seats in her district.
In the school year of 2017–2018, at least 76 students in this district were involved in incidents in which police were called, according to the New York City Open data. Singh aims to reform schools by making them police and metal-detector free. Joining the New Deal for CUNY bill, which restores free tuition and establishes minimum staff-to-student ratios for mental health counselors, academic advisors and full-time faculty at CUNY, she plans to expand the faculty positions by 5,000, including recruiting people of color.
“We must build systems that actively dismantles the segregation and inequities that have plagued our school system,” reads her campaign website.
“My policy centers on the folks who are the most marginalized and forgotten in this community that includes immigrants, that includes children of working-class families, that includes our Black community, our Latinx community, our South Asian community,” Singh said.
With nine Democrats and one Republican running to represent the city in 2021, Steph Caballerl, the campaign manager for Singh, says she feels positive about how the campaign is progressing. COVID-19 has changed the way campaigning works for the team who must use car trunks and spaces in apartments to store campaign literature instead of renting out a space for an office. The campaign has raised a total of $40,942.40 and spent $113,298.46 on campaign literature such as flyers, posters, along with event supplies, food for volunteers, and the launching of the website.
“It’s going to be tough, it’s always going to be tough,” said Caballerl, as the team canvass every day, with almost two days left for the election.
For Singh, growing up in a working-class home meant money regularly became a source of concern at the beginning and the end of the month. Growing up in Queens, a borough comprising a large working-class population, shaped her perspective about savings and living in a city that uplifts the working-class.
“When you navigate a system in New York City,” Singh said, “whether it’s the taxi medallion system, whether it’s the education system, whether it’s working at a local grocery store, navigating it and not being valued is a systemic problem.”
This experience is reflected in her policy to address the issues faced by all working-class New Yorkers, including Blacks Latinx and Asian residents. She soon plans to execute a comprehensive health care plan that expands access to doulas and midwives during pregnancy to reduce the mortality rate for pregnant women, especially from the Black community.
“We can’t wait for people to understand what we are going through,” Singh said “We need people who lived these experiences to be in the City Hall talking about it, advocating, and creating policy changes.”
The Affinity for Democratic Socialism
Born and raised in Glen Oaks, Kaur grew up playing in Alley Pond Park, riding the Q46 bus and celebrating birthdays at Jackson Diner. Her father drove a yellow taxi cab for nearly three decades while her mother still works at a grocery store.
“This district doesn’t feel like home to me. It’s more than that, it feels like family,” she said in her campaign video.
After the medallion market crashed seven years ago, her family got locked into a punishing cycle of debt and food stamps for nearly two years. A graduate of Nassau Community College in gender studies, Kaur still struggles to pay hefty tuition loans and bills.
“I am running to defend my home, to protect my family, and to ensure all my neighbors the means to lead a dignified life,” reads Kaur’s campaign website where her platform is to revive economic stability for workers and small businesses.
As a part of the campaigning process, securing endorsements is critical to these candidates. With nearly 40 endorsements in her arsenal, Kaur managed to get coveted backing from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez, who joined the New York City Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) in its endorsement of Kaur.
Building on the political revolution launched by Sanders, DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States that is driven to enable working-class people to run the economy and society to meet human needs. With over 92,000 members and chapters in all 50 states, the New York City-DCA chapter endorses a total of six City Council candidates, including Tiffany Cabán, Adolfo Abreu, Michael Hollingsworth, Brandon West, Alexa Avilés and Kaur.
Kaur said she feels aligned with the values of the DSA.
“It’s a really powerful place that I call political home for me because democratic socialism is a commitment to building up collective people power and ensuring that every single person gets to live a dignified life,” said Kaur. She said she believes in acting in solidarity with each other and challenges the systems that she says have divided the city for several years into the haves and have-nots.
Socialism, according to Sumathy Kumar, co-chair of New York City DSA, is giving people control over their own lives, not just when it comes to political decisions, but economic decisions as well. With almost 8,000 members in New York City, DSA identifies itself as a working-class organization.
The two fundamental identifiers of “working-class,” according to Professor Muzzio, are the socio-economic status and the cultural attitudes of the people belonging to this spectrum. He says the cultural attitudes of South Asians, puts them into a different category.
“It’s difficult to say with any certainty, but boy, you would put South Asians’ economic success, as it is and has been, in terms of a cultural attitude of success, which makes them middle class,” he said.
Kaur, however, makes no such distinction among her potential constituency.
“One of the things we actually want to push for at the city and state level is commercial rent relief so that many of these small businesses aren’t getting exploited by landlords,” said Kaur who wants to increase legal and workplace protection of workers and increase funding for union apprenticeship and job training in the growing industry.
A report by Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit influential group comprising the city’s eminent business leaders chronicles the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses. The report says the city’s unemployment rate has reached 18.3 per cent and as many as 520,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector. According to Kaur, small businesses in her district pay between $5K to -$8K a month just to keep their physical brick and mortar space, which has become a challenge with the reduction in the stream of customers due to COVID-19.
“It’s a story about making sure that our street vendors, delivery service workers, domestic workers, all these people actually have a chance to continue raising their family without having to go homeless,” said Kaur whose priority in the City Council is to establish a loan funding process that makes it easier for worker powered business to access capital and to streamline the certification process in the Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises, a state-run certification program that extends opportunities for minority and women entrepreneurs to access government contracts and grow their businesses.
“Our city and state should be taking care of our immigrant communities, especially after Trump being our president, there have been so many rights that have been rolled back. And it’s our responsibility to put them back on the table,” she said.
“[Kaur] is a working-class New Yorker, a woman of color born and raised in her neighborhood. And she wanted to run as a democratic socialist unapologetically,” said Sumathy Kumar, the co-chair of New York City DSA, about the policies and causes Kaur advocates and why DSA decided to endorse her.
“We want to see candidates who want to use their elections and their offices to grow our movement and organize their neighborhoods, and Jaslin wanted to do that,” she said “And so, it was an obvious choice.”
The campaign team for Kaur gathers almost every day to canvas, door-knock and talk to the district residents about her run for City Council. On April 25, the team succeeded in recruiting approximately 50 volunteers, not an easy feat during a pandemic. With the goal of reaching at least 40 houses per volunteer, the team was trained to convey key campaign messages in a variety of languages ranging from Punjabi, Bangladeshi, Gujarati, Spanish and English.
“Right now, we are not just up against those who are seeking to break the power of working-class, we’re up against those who tell us to accept crumbs as sufficient,” said Zohran Kwame Mamdani, assembly member of the 36th District of New York State Assembly, at the canvas session. “We know that if we put Jaslin in City Hall and if we put the rest of the socialist slate in the City Hall, then no longer will we have to celebrate when they simply give us crumbs. She is the answer to this district’s struggles and she is going to map out what the solution would look like for this district and for the entire city of New York.”
Onema Ahmed, a middle-school teacher and a resident of District 23, was present at the canvassing event, too.
“Jaslin has inspired not only me but my entire family to dream about seeing a city make changes that makes our lives better,” she said. “Since our first week of action in February, I’ve been out with the field team, even brought my mom out once. It’s been really rewarding getting to talk to my neighbors about why I think Jaslin is the best candidate”.
With elections around the corner, Kaur’s team has raised a total of $43,797.66 through campaign donations. While fundraising and monetary support from within the community can help kick-start a campaign, it does not necessarily guarantee success. For newcomers like Kaur, the campaign has posed several challenges.
She recently took Twitter to address a case of what she called political slandering. “My fellow Punjabi candidates, Jindal and Harpreet Singh Toor [candidates running for the same City Council seat] have waged a full-on misogynistic campaign of intimidation against me, my neighbors and supporters,” said Kaur via a statement posted on her site on June 8 in which she claims Jindal and Toor, have resorted to attacks on her campaign allegedly telling voters she dropped out of the race. They allegedly shared ads attacking her team, which is paid by Stephen Ross who is “a racist billionaire Trump mega-donor” the statement read.
“I am not the type who is going to back down when faced with a challenge,” Kaur said “I am somebody who stands up for myself and I think that’s a model I want to set for so many other young women, especially if they want to come into politics. “This is really cut-throat. This place is sometimes dangerous for a lot of young women as well.”
In what appears to be a response to the allegations, Jindal via a tweet said “We can be political rivals and disagree on issues, but shouldn’t cast desperate attacks on each other’s character.” Both Jindal and Toor did not respond to the reporter regarding the allegations.
According to the United States Census Bureau, women make up 52.3 per cent of New York City’s, many of whom belong to the Black or African American, Asians or Hispanic or Latino communities. However, only nine women serve in the city council of 51 members. The paucity of women representation on the City Council has driven several women to run for office.
“New York is ready for [women] because we are them! New York is a city of women of color, of people of color, of South Asians,” said Sumathy Kumar, the co-chair of New York’s DSA weighing upon the representation of women in the City Council.
“I think New Yorkers are ready, but people in power are not and they are trying everything in their power to stop people, like Jaslin, from winning”.
One Candidate’s Focus on Queer Representation and Union Advocacy
On a sunny Saturday afternoon on May 1, a large assembly of union workers gathered under the Queensboro Bridge. On International Worker’s Day, these union members assembled with the agenda to demonstrate their support for Amit Bagga, a queer South Asian American running for City Council District 26 that comprises Sunnyside, Woodside, Long Island City and Astoria. With 14 years of experience in local government, Amit has written several laws and built direct service operations that have secured the lives of New Yorkers.
While succeeding in his professional career, Bagga’s teenage years were difficult. He came out but learned early about anti-LGBTQ stigma through homophobic bullying in school. To be queer and South Asian posed as a struggle for Bagga.
In the book, Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development, Sri Craven, an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University in Oregon points to the patriarchal make-up of the community as a roadblock for many who do not conform to traditional identities. “Gender operates as a key vector of consideration of queerness and queer rights,” the author wrote in the handbook. “Across South Asia, androcentric and male-driven patriarchal cultures limit queer presence and women’s sexuality, while facilitating greater opportunities in general for male sexual activity.”
Bagga sees himself as a representation of the generations of queer South Asians who have not had a voice in their communities or in New York City broadly.
Pursuing long overdue racial and gender justice, Bagga has outlined numerous policies, from expanding healthcare access, providing enriching public schools, to funding groups that support immigrant workers.
With the majestic Queensboro Bridge as a backdrop, Bagga took the stage and spoke to the union groups that included Hotel Trades Council, New York State Nurses Association and New York Communities for Change, about his plan to create 100,000 new jobs by pressing needs such as fighting climate change, greening the infrastructure through open spaces and bike lanes, and providing publicly-funded healthcare system that empowers union workers and give way for more green jobs.
“I am running for City Council, so that I, can lead on your behalf in rewriting the social contract between government and communities,” Bagga told the members, “so that every single one of us has access to economic opportunity, so that we may all live with dignity and build community power together.”
But with the onset of the pandemic, she, like several other New Yorkers in the hotel industry, was laid off. As a part of the Hotel Trade Council, the union came to her aid during the pandemic by providing her family with health insurance for free and severance pay to help support them during the pandemic. She attended the rally to show support for Bagga.
“Amit has worked extremely hard to put together a smart and thoughtful jobs platform. He wants to make sure that workers are at the center of our city’s recovery from pandemic,” she said. “As a Tibetan, I think it is long due for us to have a South Asian representation in New York City. Electing Amit would be a huge win and be a historic moment for South Asians. I can’t wait to see him in the office.”
Another signature policy drafted by Bagga is the NYC Fair Economy Fund which is a “publicly-funded training, employment, and organizing program dedicated to achieving justice for those New Yorkers who have been historically excluded from the economy and who have disproportionately suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic” the policy reads on his campaign website.
If elected, Bagga plans in his first year in office to take $100 million of city tax-payer funding which is 0.1 per cent of the city’s budget, and publicly fund labor organizers, including those in traditional employer-employee relationships, freelancers and gig workers. “It’s actually a very small investment but a very meaningful one,” said Bagga, who aims to fund linguistically and culturally competent community organizers who can provide workplace rights training.
“One of the issues we see in the economy everywhere is that workers always get the shorter end of the stick when it comes to their power in any situation, they are walking into,”. said Bagga, “This is often because workers don’t necessarily know their rights; it’s because workers are not trained in their rights.”
Bagga was among the authors of the Fair Work Week Law that requires all fast-food establishments in New York City to give their workers a transparent schedule of how much they are required to work, predictable work schedules and the opportunity to work newly available shifts before they hire new workers.
The Fair Economy Fund also aims to fund immigrant-owned small businesses, help access capital and loans for them, and fund culturally and linguistically diverse local community groups that would go door-to-door to small businesses and work in tandem with Community Development Financial Institutions, local financial bodies designed to help small business and low-income families, and bridge gaps that can help small businesses thrive.
“With respect to small business,” said Bagga, “one of the things we have seen is last year Congress had passed hundreds of millions of dollars of relief for small businesses all over the country, yet, right here in my district business, on GreenPoint Avenue, all run by immigrants, didn’t even know how to apply for that relief. Meanwhile, the big business at Madison Avenue in Manhattan for whom this relief was not designed was able to get their hands on it. Why is that the case? Because the government has completely failed at doing its job at effectively communicating with the people who need the help the most.”
“For policy to be successful it has to be made by people who are most failed by it,” Nick Berkowitz, Bagga’s campaign manager, said. “Amit would be the first queer South Asian elected in the United States.
That is a perspective that has not been represented and brings with him massive amounts of information and experience as that can be better reflected in the legislation.”
A Legacy of the 9/11 Attacks
Late into the night in the fall of 2001, Moumita Ahmed made frantic phone calls to a list of hospitals across New York City. She called one hospital after another and described to them a detailed physical description of her father, Ahmed, who worked at a newsstand in the World Trade Center. Finally, Elmhurst Hospital said it had a body that fit the description.
“You can come to identify the body,” Moumita Ahmed was told.
Moumita, then a 12-year-old daughter to Bangladeshi immigrants, was accompanied by her uncle to the hospital. Tears cascaded down her eyes and terror took over her, as her uncle went inside to identify the body.
“I hope it’s not him,” she repeated to herself while waiting for her uncle to return.
After a few moments, Ahmed saw her uncle return and held her breath while he broke the news to her.
“It’s not him,” he said.
In the weeks following the attacks, the United States witnessed a surge in backlash and hate crimes against South Asians and Middle Easterners. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man, was one of the first victims of the hate crime. He was the owner of a gas station in Arizona and was shot dead at his workplace on September 15, 2001.
In New York City, the New York Police Department (NYPD) witnessed a significant redeployment of law enforcement. According to Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11: Comparing Perspectives on a Complex Process, a journal article by Avram Bornstein, law enforcement brandished a greater public display of weapons; increased suspicion; surveillance, detention and deportation of Arab and Muslim immigrants; and execution of Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy. While Arab and Muslim communities shared the traumatized incident of 9/11 with other New Yorkers, they suffered an additional fear of being considered the victims of retribution.
Ahmed, Moumita’s father, was a man who lived by his routine. A resident in the neighborhood of Corona, Elmhurst, and Middle Village in Queens, he would travel to Manhattan to his place of work and would return from 7.30 pm to 8.30 pm in the evenings. After losing his job at a newsstand inside the rubble of the World Trade Center, Ahmed was in between part-time jobs in the city.
One day he left for work but didn’t return home.
Ahmed’s family grew in panic as each hour went by. They scoured hospitals, morgues and police stations. Meanwhile, Ahmed, who was on his way home, was stopped by a police officer in the subway who carried out the stop-and-frisk policy on him. He didn’t speak English and failed to explain to the officer that he was returning home and was using the subway to commute. Her father was then arrested by the NYPD and imprisoned without a phone call, according to Moumita.
“He was unfairly interrogated and targeted for being Muslim and having the same last name as one of the terrorists on the plane. His name is Ahmed, which is a very common Muslim name,” she said. “At that time, I recall feeling very frustrated, because I knew it was a violation of his rights.”
“Anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia, are really rooted in the history of this country,” said Rana Abdelhamid, a democratic candidate for New York’s 12th district in Congress that includes a majority of East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, and extends across the East River into the Boroughs of Queens comprising of Astoria, Long Island City, and parts of Woodside, and Brooklyn. Abdelhamid witnessed Islamophobia when a man ripped off her hijab and assaulted her on the street when she was 16 years old.
“The government dehumanized my community for so long that it normalized violence against someone like me who was a teenage girl trying to walk down the street,” said Abdelhamid, who is running for office with the hope of enabling communities of color to not only survive but thrive in the city.
After acquiring a lawyer and finding her father locked up in a holding cell at a police precinct in the early hours of the next day, Ahmed felt what she described as powerlessness, a moment that crystallized for her the plight of immigrants in New York.
“It definitely shaped my views in politics,” Ahmed said, “That’s when I gauged class consciousness and realized we’re working class.” She is running for District council 24 to try to succeed term-limited James Gennaro.
South Asian languages are the second largest group of Asian languages in the city according to a 2018 report by the Asian American Federation. While Bangladeshis make the fifth-largest Asian group with approximately 62,000 residents, District 24 contains the largest Bangladeshi speaking population with over 10,000 people. The Asian American Federation reported this year that nearly half the Asian population in the city has limited English proficiency (LEP), which meant they did not identify as speaking English “only” or speaking English “very well.”
As a young girl, Ahmed recalls translating for her family and navigating systems and institutions in the city. Her father faced the brunt of not knowing English and this experience played a role in Ahmed’s policy framework for language access across the city.
“We have a right to understand,” she wrote on her campaign website. “Over half of all immigrants don’t speak English in our city, and many don’t receive the same services and support as other New Yorkers. Immigrants pay taxes and contribute to our city. They should feel that they have a voice.”
If she wins a seat in the office, Ahmed plans to expand translation and interpretation services. She aims for the city to hire bilingual staff and expand language in the courts, healthcare, and police departments.
As the founder of Queens Mutual Aid, an NGO that has provided aid and support to New Yorkers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ahmed and her team worked throughout the pandemic to support seniors and other individuals who lacked language proficiency, access to the internet or computers to receive meals and every day commodities.
“We did that work which the City Council should have done,” she said.
“Although identity is important, the policy we hold as individuals is important,” said Rima Begum, the co-chair of Bangladeshi Americans for Political Progress, a grassroots movement to elect political candidates and advocate for legislation that protects and advances the well-being of the working class and low-income communities. As a tenant organizer, she says language barriers also leave tenants unaware of basic information on housing rights.
“I spend a lot of time in the housing court where interpreters interpreting for clients and not understanding the context, not understanding the huge difference between ‘You need to sign here’ and ‘If you sign this, these are the risks and benefits,’ ” said Begum, who supports Ahmed’s plan for language justice.
Ahmed identifies herself as a left-leaning working-class politician and is endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Courage to Change to Change PAC, a movement designed to support individuals who demonstrate political courage and advocate for working-class, racial, social, economic, and environmental justice, among several other endorsements. While her endorsements lend a degree of optimism to her campaign, raising donations for campaign expenses has been a challenge for Ahmed. To alleviate this, her campaign is enrolled with the Matching Funds program that allows working-class candidates like her to receive up to $20,000 in public funds per eligible contributor.
“I’ve had to call people every day and ask for $10, $20, $50, whatever they can give,” she said, as her team has collectively raised $37,111.27 according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
Most candidates leaning Democratic also share a common ideological approach in their policies, many of which cater to the marginalized, working-class cohort of the city.
“They want exactly what other New Yorkers have,” said Muzzio.
“When you have groups of white men for decades and decades to essentially figure out how to deal with issues of racialized intergenerational poverty, housing conditions and affordability, and lack of healthcare access, you are not going to be able to have policies that are really designed with the people in mind that need the help,” said Bagga. “Unless we have a seat at the table, we are not going to be able to come up with a meal that’s going to make any sense.”
South Asian Americans clearly have ample endorsements and political will that help put these candidates on the political map. But the support they garner via votes-whether by community members who resonate with their policies or simply because they look like them ultimately decides whether the City Council will give them a seat at the table and whether this advent will influence New York’s political discourse.
After announcing the unofficial election night results on July 12, the New York City Board of Elections released certified election results on July 20. Though the elections were held on June 22, the new ranked-choice voting system and the number of absentee ballots resulted in a significant delay to gain clarity on winners in the city-wide elections. The results confirmed that Singh won the democratic elections for Council Member 32 Council District Primary with 4,686 of the votes in the final round. Kaur (5,992 votes), Ahmed (3,020 votes) and Bagga (5,211 votes) emerged as runners-up in the elections, thus ending their bids for office in this election cycle.
With this historic turnaround, Singh, via an email, said “I’m proud to be the Democratic nominee for District 32. My platform and policies resonated with voters, and that is because my campaign centers community care in order to fix systemic issues, address the climate crisis, and epidemics like poverty and gun violence.”
As District 32 flips from red to blue, Singh recollects when people constantly told her to give up.
“Oh, you’re going to learn what it’s like to knock doors in this neighbourhood because people are going to look at you and they’re just going to be really racist. No one is going to vote for a South Asian woman,” she said.
In a heartfelt thank you video she said “No one thought that a person like, people like us, could be visible in a district that is Republican. Nobody.”
