When Zohran Mamdani won New York’s mayoral election, his victory speech ended with a curious pairing: the idealism of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” and the electric pulse of Dhoom Machale. The moment went viral — a young, Indian-origin leader quoting the founding father of modern India before dancing offstage to a Bollywood beat.
But behind that exuberant moment lay an older story, one that began half a century ago in a very different India.
In the early 1970s, Zohran’s father, Mahmood Mamdani — then a rising scholar — came to Punjab to revisit what was then hailed as a triumph of population control: The Khanna Study. Conducted by Harvard researchers in the 1950s, it was the first major scientific attempt to test whether birth control could stem poverty. The experiment was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Indian government. For six years, they tracked births, deaths, and family size across villages in Ludhiana district.
But Mamdani’s return to the field overturned everything. What he found was not data, but dissonance. The villagers had nodded through interviews, accepted contraceptives out of politeness, and continued with life as usual. The supposed success of “population control,” he discovered, was an illusion born of metrics that failed to measure meaning.
His book The Myth of Population Control was an act of intellectual defiance. It questioned the moral authority of Western development theory and exposed the class bias of social scientists who believed fertility was a problem to be solved, not a symptom to be understood. “In a peasant economy,” he wrote, “children — especially sons — are the only insurance against hunger.”
The study’s failure, as he saw it, lay not in poor implementation but in arrogance — in assuming that the solution to poverty could be delivered in pills.
In that sense, the Khanna experiment was never just about family planning; it was about how power frames truth. Mamdani’s critique resonated across continents, influencing thinkers who would later challenge the “overpopulation equals poverty” logic at the heart of Western policy.
And now, his son — born in Kampala, raised in New York — stands at another frontier of power, shaping narratives in a city that embodies the very global entanglements his father once dissected.
When Zohran quoted Nehru that night, perhaps it wasn’t just nostalgia. Perhaps it was inheritance — a subtle echo of the same defiance that once made Mahmood Mamdani question the world’s most comfortable myths.
