The Meaning of Mamdani

THERE IS A distinct whiff of the late Sixties in the air of America. A hard-right ideologue in the White House who believes that a military hammer is complementary to the peace process, while the campus is aflame with passionate support for a perceived victim of war. It was Richard Nixon and Vietnam then; it is Donald Trump and Gaza now. Parallels are rarely equivalent; they cannot be because both the history and geography of conflict are different. Nor does Trump have a Henry Kissinger by his side, for prayer (occasional), persuasion (frequent), and diplomacy (persistent), but then Trump is also his own Kissinger.

The mirror is more accurate when reflecting street rage, which has crossed the Atlantic into Europe. Israel may be shocked when it eventually calculates the long-term damage to credibility from visceral images of elderly Gazans being blown up as they scrounge for food and helpless children dying in thousands. The world was with Israel when Hamas inflicted terrible, unforgiveable death on an Israeli music festival. Now, Britain’s most popular music event, Glastonbury, resonates with chants of “Death to IDF” and star performers globalise the Palestine intifada while British authorities wonder how this footage slipped into BBC coverage.

Governments cannot remain immune from the street in a democracy. Ireland has banned imports from Israel; Spain and South Africa have voiced outrage. In New York, a complete outsider wins the Democratic Party primary and becomes favourite in the election for the world’s most powerful mayor despite praising the Palestine intifada. That is not the principal reason why Zohran Mamdani defeated a prince of the Democratic establishment, Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani wants to tax billionaires and millionaires to fund a minimum wage of $30 per hour, universal childcare, free buses and freeze rent. But he also wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should the current Israeli prime minister set foot in the city. Donald Trump, never one to settle for spoken when one can be outspoken, has castigated Mamdani as a communist lunatic and threatened to cut $100 billion in federal funds to the city if Mamdani practises what he preaches.

Mamdani avers that his inspiration is Reverend Martin Luther King. The loop to the late Sixties is complete.

Time, then, to change Air India’s logo from a Maharaja with a courteous back to a lachrymose crocodile. Most of us have never been privileged enough to see a crocodile cry but we could hardly miss the energetic display of such tears from Air India’s chief executive Campbell Wilson after the tragic crash in Ahmedabad on June 12.

He took about a week to convert those tears into a letter to members of Air India’s Maharaja Club. Nothing reveals insincerity more than the plagiarism. According to reports, nearly half of that statement was cut and pasted from the reaction of American Airlines CEO Robert Isom after the death of 67 people when a commercial jet collided with a military helicopter near Washington DC.

Accidents are tragic. No executive, chief or not, wants an accident. The tears are false because the service and management of Air India, once the pride of the nation, have been in constant decline and disarray, and little has improved since the airline was returned to private management. Air India was the beloved child of a true genius, JRD Tata. I met JRD just once. It was a high privilege. He was a hero of India. JRD’s memory remains iridescent but his legacy is under severe strain.

It is the average experience, never the subject of any inquiry, that reveals the dilapidated state of what was once a fabled name. Not too many days before the crash, we were on an Air India evening flight from Vienna to Delhi. The crew was busy ignoring our corner of the aircraft, but patience has become a necessary virtue. A colleague seated next to me wanted nothing more than a quick dinner before sleep. After nearly two hours of watching the crew busy with chat and service elsewhere, one was forced to walk up and suggest that perhaps we might be entitled to a little attention. My colleague, barely able to contain his irritation, had decided to forget the meal, only to discover that his seat would not unfold into an airline bed. A hinge was broken. This business-class seat did not break in Vienna. It was clearly damaged before the plane left India. No one cared. The management forced flights to remain operational despite dysfunctional seats; nor did they have the courtesy to keep the seat empty. No explanation was offered because there was none. Passenger complaints are lucky to get a polite non-sequitur. Most flyers are too relieved upon reaching their destination to pursue their case. While writing, news came of an Air India Boeing 787 flight from Tokyo to Delhi being diverted to Kolkata because the air-conditioning had failed. Before the Ahmedabad tragedy the flight would have continued to Delhi in all likelihood.

Wilson ended his letter of apology to members of Air India’s Maharaja Club not in sorrow but with “Warm regards”. Which world is he living in? Sensitivity is not required from Air India’s superior executives but becomes cause for punitive action in the case of the crew. The suspension of crew members for dancing at a private party a few days after the accident is a typical smokescreen. Flying crews live in constant tension. Accidents do not spare young lives. They fly continually. They live danger. They died in Ahmedabad. Making them scapegoats is an insult to their service. The controversial party was a misdemeanour; but it did not put the lives of passengers at risk. The people who deserve to be suspended are those who suspended the crew.

Today a seat goes wrong, tomorrow an engine.

An interesting fact from the litany of coincidences that bustle around aviation history: There have been only five other instances of a sole survivor in an air crash. Cecelia Cichan lived on August 16, 1987 when 156 died. On March 6, 2003 Youcef Djillali survived an Air Algérie crash which killed 102; as did Mohammed el-Fateh in Sudan on July 8, 2003; Bahia Bakari on June 30, 2009 in Yemen; and nine-year-old Ruben van Assouw at Tripoli on May 12, 2010.

Those taking a flight to London for a summer break might want to check a few statistics. This was published in The Times: 60,000 mobile phones are snatched each year in London, or one every three minutes; nearly 10,000 of them in tourist-heavy West End. Nearby Westminster St James comes second with 20,575. The tally for the last four years is some 231,000 phones, around 90,000 in London. The real figure is higher since many thefts go unrecorded largely because the chance of recovery is a virtual zero. The police have surrendered to petty criminals. Less than 1 per cent of thefts and break-ins result in police action. Little wonder then that the big shift in tourism is towards Moscow, which has seen a 40 per cent rise from 2024. Even Arabs are deserting London. There has been a 570 per cent surge in Saudi tourism to Moscow, which means terrific news for the Russian economy.

An editorial in the weekly magazine Spectator dated May 7, 2025 is candid about Britain: “…our public squares are squalid, lawless, derelict spaces…Shoplifters go unpunished, fly-tipping is unpursued, drug-taking and dealing are commonplace. The busy commercial and social life of the high street a generation ago has been supplemented by rows of barber shops many of which are cover for money laundering, vape stores which feed teen addictions and vacant sites which distant landlords feel no incentive to fill. The air of decline hangs as heavy over these precincts as the persistent and sickly aroma of cannabis smoke”.

Rudyard Kipling dismissed British Calcutta as the city of dreadful night. Has London become the city of dreadful day?

angry streetsCampbell WilsonDonald TrumpNew YorkUS politicsZohran Mamdani