It looks like the story of Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York politics just got a whole lot murkier — and a lot less “grassroots.” What’s being hailed by progressives as a “historic organizing victory” is starting to look more like a foreign-influenced political operation hiding in plain sight.

At the center of it all is Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) — a so-called immigrant rights nonprofit that appears to have built the most aggressive, ethnically-driven political machine in New York City. The group and its political arm, DRUM Beats, were critical to Mamdani’s stunning primary victory over Andrew Cuomo, boasting that they helped turn out more than 150,000 South Asian and Indo-Caribbean voters.

And that’s not just campaign fluff. According to their own claims, South Asian voter turnout jumped an eye-popping 40% compared to 2021 — with Bangladeshi turnout up 13% and Pakistani turnout up 11%. That’s not a coincidence; that’s coordination.

Mamdani even bragged about it himself, posting on Facebook that his campaign “worked closely with organizations like @drumbeatsnyc and @caaavvoice,” adding that “we made videos in Bangla and Urdu” and “canvassed more than one-third of all South Asian residents.” Translation: this wasn’t a citywide campaign — it was a foreign-language micro-operation tailored to turn out specific ethnic blocs.

But here’s where things start to cross the line.

DRUM’s leadership has been publicly engaging with radical Marxist movements overseas, including Pakistan’s Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) — a socialist organization that proudly advocates a “synthesis of nationalist movements of oppressed nationalities” and “the socialist movement.”

In 2022, DRUM’s executive director Fahd Ahmed posted about his “opportunity to engage” with key HKP leaders, praising their ideas as “encouraging and impressive.” Those same HKP figures move in the same global far-left circles as the Tricontinental Institute, funded by a China-linked billionaire, and often collaborate with groups like The People’s Forum — now under congressional investigation for alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

If this were a Republican campaign with that kind of foreign connection, you can bet every network from CNN to MSNBC would be calling it “foreign election interference.” But because it’s a darling of the progressive Left, suddenly it’s just “community organizing.”

The problem runs even deeper: DRUM and DRUM Beats share the same address, the same executive director, and the same staff, even though DRUM is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legally prohibited from participating in political campaigns. Yet city records show Mamdani’s campaign paid DRUM Beats $20,000 for campaign work during the primary — while DRUM’s own organizing director, Kazi Fouzia, was openly campaigning for him.

So much for the “nonpartisan” label.

Meanwhile, Mamdani’s sudden social-media explosion raises even more red flags. Between June 1 and July 1, his Instagram following jumped from 213,000 to nearly 3 million — a staggering 1,295% increase in just one month — while TikTok saw similar gains. Analysts found that engagement from users in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh outnumbered those in the United States. Comments like “Let’s go bhai!” (“brother”) flooded his posts by the hundreds — over 750 nearly identical comments traced back to foreign accounts.

This isn’t “organic growth.” It’s textbook digital astroturfing.

In short, what we’re seeing in Mamdani’s campaign is the real-world version of what Washington elites have claimed to fear for years: foreign influence in American elections, not through shadowy bots or secret servers, but out in the open — funded, coordinated, and applauded by the progressive Left.

And if anyone still doubts the foreign fingerprints, just look at DRUM’s own rhetoric. Its leaders proudly described themselves as “a gang” in a Politico interview, saying, “When we go to any shop, people just move aside and say, ‘Oh my God. The DRUM leaders are here.’” Sounds less like a civic group and more like a political cartel.

So yes, foreign interference may have finally arrived — just not in the form the Democrats warned us about. Instead of Russia, it’s radical socialist networks from Pakistan and China-linked groups playing kingmaker in New York City politics.

And their chosen candidate, Zohran Mamdani, owes them everything.

Because when 13% more Bangladeshi voters and 11% more Pakistani voters turn out in a city election — and that’s the exact margin that flips the race — that’s not coincidence. That’s the foreign-influence machine in action.

The good news? At least now, Americans are seeing exactly what kind of “movement” the modern Left is willing to embrace — and who’s really pulling the strings behind the scenes.