In Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech, two prominent references, to Eugene V Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru, might at first seem like discrete, unconnected invocations. One was a firebrand mobiliser; the other rose to the heights of nation-building and statesmanship. Debs helped create a potent tradition of socialism in the United States; he stands as one of the towering figures of decolonisation. Yet these references are neither random nor rhetorical flourishes. Conceptually and historically, they are closely intertwined.
The surprising thread connecting Debs and Nehru is Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin and Nehru were close friends. Baldwin shaped many of Nehru’s views on America and advised him on the Congress party’s American strategy. The two worked together in the League Against Imperialism until Baldwin broke with it over concerns about communist influence — a position Nehru himself shared. Baldwin had worked with and was deeply aligned with Debs’s anti-imperialism and his defence of conscientious objection.
Debs saw racism and the exclusion of immigrants not as aberrations but as tools of bourgeois self-interest. For him, it was the working class — not the privileged elite — that heralded a genuinely open and cosmopolitan society. In contemporary parlance, one might say that the cosmopolitanism of the city is the cosmopolitanism of labour, not of capital.
Nehru himself was interested in whether the ACLU could take up the cause of political prisoners in India. The ideological thread connecting these figures belonged to a historical moment we have largely forgotten — when civil liberties, anti-racism, socialism, open societies, and decolonisation were all considered part of a single emancipatory movement. Freedom and justice were indivisible.
Baldwin warned Nehru that the fight for Indian independence would have to be waged on two fronts: Against “the hidden enemy of Wall Street, backed by the American government, and against Britain”. The former, he said, would always seek to preserve India as a source of revenue for the British Empire. Civil liberties, in this view, were a cause of the Left — distinguishing it from communism and far removed from today’s libertarian appropriation. What is so resonant about this connection is the reminder that civil liberties once meant defending even the rights of those accused of conscientious objection and treason. In an age when the definition of treason has expanded to the point that the very idea of a “political prisoner” has lost meaning, this history bears remembering.
History comes full circle in curious ways. It is fitting that Amrit Singh, the daughter of the last Nehruvian, Manmohan Singh, should emerge as one of the leading lights of the ACLU. Mamdani, in connecting Debs and Nehru, is not deploying a freshly minted Gen Z progressive vocabulary; he is retrieving an older, forgotten idiom of 20th-century politics.
Poignant moments in politics are rare; they are easily eclipsed by the brutalities of power. Yet Mamdani’s invocation of Nehru recalled a formative episode in Nehru’s own life — his first engagement with city government at the age of 34, when he was elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board. This is the same age at which Mamdani becomes mayor. At first, Nehru saw the role as a distraction from national politics, and he shared the perennial frustration of city leaders: How little actual power they possess. But he soon convinced himself that it was within the board’s reach to make “life more bearable, a little less painful to the inhabitants of Allahabad”.
As Mohammed Aqil’s research shows, Nehru’s municipal priorities were, unsurprisingly, centered on the marginalised — the property rights of prostitutes, ekkawalas, and the urban poor. It was the city that made Nehru’s sense of India’s problems more concrete. Transport policy became a site of tension between providing free rides and increasing the wages of ekkawalas. Ironically, given India’s later fiscal history, Nehru vehemently opposed octroi as a regressive tax. He preferred to tax the rich, using the employment of multiple servants as a proxy for wealth.
Housing was central to his agenda, and he admired the Vienna model of financing housing for all, with higher charges for those who could afford to pay. He was an ardent advocate of free public spaces and believed that cities were the incubators of civic ideals. At least during his Allahabad years, Nehru saw statism as diminishing civic virtue, while socialism — understood as cooperative relations among citizens — strengthened it.
Nehru’s time in prison made him sympathetic to Lewis Lawes, the warden of Sing Sing Prison in New York, who believed that more than 80 per cent of prisoners were not anti-social or inherently bad — that better economic policy, education and employment could empty the prisons.
Later, Nehru developed a distinct vision for India’s cosmopolitan cities such as Bombay and Madras. He saw them as polyglot zones whose vitality came from linguistic and cultural diversity. His reluctance about the reorganisation of states stemmed from a fear that linguistic nationalism would erode this cosmopolitan spirit. The unapologetic celebration of polyglotness was a quintessentially Nehruvian hallmark.
Nehru’s relationship with American leaders and geopolitics was often testy. Yet the India-US relationship has always been entwined at the level of ideas — through vast movements of intellectual, political and spiritual exchange. It is a history of ideational affinities, not of ethnic showcasing. We often recall Gandhi’s influence on American life, but we forget Nehru’s intellectual presence, choosing instead to participate in the lazy condescension of posterity.
Martin Luther King Jr, who himself acknowledged Nehru as an inspiration, offered perhaps the most eloquent tribute to Nehru’s enduring presence: “In all these struggles of mankind to rise to a true state of civilisation, the towering figure of Nehru sits unseen but felt at all the council tables. He is missed by the world, and because he is so wanted, he is a living force in the tremulous world of today.”
Inevitably, these threads of freedom ended in disappointment, but what potential they carried.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
