MEA slams New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for note to jailed Umar Khalid: ‘Personal prejudices’

New York City’s newly sworn-in mayor Zohran Mamdani (left) and MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal. (Express photo)

Days after New York City’s newly sworn-in Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent a hand-written note to Umar Khalid, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Friday reacted sharply to it and said “expressing personal prejudices do not behove those in office”.

Mamdani, in the note, had said he often thought about the jailed former JNU student leader’s thoughts on bitterness. “I think of your words on bitterness often, and the importance of not letting it consume one’s self. It was a pleasure to meet your parents. We are all thinking of you,” Mamdani had written.

Hitting out at Mamdani, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal on Friday said, “We expect public representatives to be respectful of the independence of judiciary in other democracies. Expressing personal prejudices do not behove those in office. Instead of such comments, it would be better to focus on the responsibilities entrusted to them.”

A photograph of the note was shared on X last week by Khalid’s partner, Banojyotsna Lahiri, the day Mamdani took office as the mayor of New York.

Lahiri said Khalid’s parents, Sahiba Khanam and Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, had travelled to the US to visit their daughter ahead of a family wedding.

“They met Mamdani in early December, and that’s when he wrote this letter to Umar,” she said.

Khalid, who has been in jail for six years in connection with the 2020 Northeast Delhi riots, was granted two-week interim bail to attend his sister’s wedding last December. This was his third visit home, as he had been granted interim bail twice earlier.

In 2023, at an event in New York, Mamdani publicly read excerpts from a letter Khalid had written from prison.

Khalid and 17 others are facing allegations of indulging in a “larger conspiracy” to cause the riots in Northeast Delhi between February 23, 2020, and February 25, 2020, which left 53 people dead and over 700 injured.