In a New York reshaped by community voices and immigrant ambition, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is assembling a transition team unlike any the city has seen before. At its heart: a remarkable group of Bangladeshi Americans whose journeys reflect the city’s own restless reinvention.
By Asma Ahmed
On a crisp, bright morning in Queens, the kind that softens even New York’s hardest edges, Zohran Mamdani steps into a small community center where immigrants from South Asia gather for everything from ESL classes to late-night political organising sessions. He still carries the energy that first brought him to public life—part poet, part social worker, part street-level visionary. The cameras haven’t arrived yet. They will. But the room quiets anyway. People know who he is. They’ve watched his rise.
Mamdani’s path from grassroots organiser to the symbolic center of New York leadership feels like the story of the city itself: layered, improvisational, moving between languages, identities, and boroughs. Born in Kampala and raised in Queens, he originally earned admiration through his work as a housing counsellor, where his knack for listening—truly listening—became his superpower. Later, his election to the New York State Assembly marked him as a new kind of leader, one who spoke about rent justice with the urgency of a neighbor and about immigrant futures with the tenderness of a son of immigrants himself.
When he announced a run for mayor, many treated it as a long shot. New York doesn’t exactly invite newcomers into its highest office.
But Mamdani was not a politician who needed the traditional machine. He had a different kind of engine: a city full of people—cab drivers, gig workers, retired aunties, delivery cyclists, schoolchildren fluent in three languages—who saw their own struggles reflected in him. His campaign felt more like a block party than a political operation, with music, food, and a warmth that pulsed across borough borders.
So when the votes were counted and Mamdani ascended to the city’s highest seat, the victory felt communal. A shared breath. A relief. A beginning.
A Transition Team That Looks Like the City
The first major sign of Mamdani’s vision came not through a speech, but through a list—a very long list. Over 400 names made up his newly announced transition team, a group assembled to shape the first year of his administration. There were child-care advocates, housing researchers, transit planners, climate organizers, street vendors, artists, and business owners. It was political choreography with intention: a city as enormous and divided as New York can only be governed by bringing people into the room who have lived its complications.
But what caught the attention of the South Asian diaspora—particularly Bangladeshi Americans—was something unprecedented: at least nine Bangladeshi New Yorkers had been appointed to key committees across the transition team. In the long arc of diaspora political engagement, the moment sparkled.
Bangladeshis in New York have long worked behind the scenes of the city’s political and cultural infrastructure. They run corner stores and community centers, lead tenant unions and youth clubs, and anchor families that stretch back to Dhaka, Sylhet, Barishal, and Chattogram. But until now, their presence in city governance has been modest, often invisible in official circles.
That chapter appears to be changing.
The Faces Behind the Milestone
According to Prothom Alo New York, the nine Bangladeshi Americans appointed include civic movement leader Kazi Fouzia; community organiser Abdul Aziz Bhuiyan; former police officer Shamsul Haque; community organiser Mohammad Karim Chowdhury; Fariha Akter; Arman Chowdhury; Shah Rehman; Tazin Azad; and Shyamtoli Haque.
They were selected for committees that match their expertise—from housing and transportation to small-business development and emergency readiness. More tellingly, they were chosen for the lived knowledge they carry, the kind that comes from spending decades navigating the city’s buses, schools, courtrooms, and streets.
For many of them, seeing their names on the list felt surreal.
Fouzia, who is widely known in Queens for her fearless advocacy for undocumented women, said the appointment felt like “a responsibility before anything else.” In her words, “The community’s joy inspired me. But now the work begins. I want to help carry out what Mayor Mamdani promised.”
Haque, the former police officer, echoed that sense of duty, saying he hoped to use his professional experience “to help improve New Yorkers’ quality of life.” His pride was evident—not for personal elevation, but for what the moment signaled about representation.
A Broader South Asian Surge
The transition team’s diversity extends beyond Bangladeshis. The list, as reported, includes eleven Pakistanis and sixteen Indians, among them Punjabi and Indo-Caribbean community figures. What emerges is not just a team but a demographic map—a portrait of South Asia woven into New York’s political DNA.
It’s a subtle but striking shift. South Asian Americans have, for years, been culturally omnipresent—running restaurants, creating art, producing television, teaching, healing, litigating, coding, writing. But politically, the movement has been slower. Mamdani’s coalition brings those parallel realities into alignment, blurring the boundary between community life and city governance.
The Mayor’s Philosophy: Policy as Care
In announcing the team, Mamdani framed the project with a clarity that feels both moral and pragmatic. He spoke of “New York’s untapped potential,” of a city that succeeds when its workers succeed, of policies rooted in affordability and dignity. Housing, child care, transportation, small-business development, and emergency preparedness—these are the categories where New Yorkers feel the daily strain. These are also the areas where the transition team’s work will matter most.
The tone was classic Mamdani: a reminder that government can be intimate and ambitious at the same time.
A Day of Pride for the Bangladeshi Diaspora
In an editorial, Prothom Alo North America called this moment “a day of pride for Bangladeshis as a community, rising above political divisions.” They urged continued unity, emphasizing that influence without cohesion is fragile.
Within the diaspora, the message resonated. This is not simply about having Bangladeshis on a list. It is about visibility.
It is about hope. It is about a next generation of Bangladeshi American teenagers—those who straddle accents and anxieties—seeing their futures in public service instead of solely in medicine, engineering, or business.
The expectation is that this milestone will give them courage. Representation has a way of doing that.
The New York That’s Coming
In the end, Mamdani’s transition team points to something larger than political appointments. It hints at a new vocabulary of leadership in New York—one shaped by immigrant histories, cross-cultural coalitions, and the steady insistence that the city’s future should belong to those who have built it piece by piece, shift by shift.
For Bangladeshi Americans, this is more than inclusion. It is arrival.
And for New York, it may just be the beginning of a new golden era of community-backed governance—one where the people shaping policy look a lot more like the people riding the subway, running the bodegas, holding the protests, raising the children, and dreaming the dreams that keep the city alive.
