New Delhi, July 22 -- Zohran Mamdani's completely unanticipated yet comprehensively decisive win in the New York City primary election for selecting the Democratic Party's mayoral candidate has sent tremors, even shockwaves, through the party establishment. For those of us who have been observing the party, it has exposed again the deep corruption at its top levels.

At the same time, this otherwise small election-after all, it is merely a party primary in a single city-has provoked the expected tropes of cultural warfare and identity politics in the US, but at a national scale: xenophobia, Islamophobia and red-baiting in particular.

Let us focus on the corruption in the Democratic party, which for the last two decades has been trying to...