A Record 96 Indian-Origin Candidates Ran for NSW Councils. The Diaspora’s Politics Starts Local

Federal politics gets the headlines, but the real story of Indian-Australian political power is being written somewhere far less glamorous: council chambers, planning meetings and pre-poll booths outside suburban libraries. At the New South Wales local elections on 14 September 2024, about 96 candidates of Indian origin stood for councils across the state, a record, and the state gained about ten Indian-origin councillors.

That is the moment a community stops being a voting bloc that others court and starts becoming a set of decision-makers in its own right. Local government runs the things that shape daily life in the suburbs where Indian-Australians are concentrated, and a generation that arrived as students and skilled migrants is now sitting on the councils that run them.

The number that jumped

The size of the 2024 field was the headline in itself. Community outlets tracking the ballot counted 96 Indian-origin candidates including independents, contesting councils from Blacktown and Parramatta in Sydney’s west to Strathfield, The Hills, Canada Bay and Hornsby. A decade ago, a handful of Indian names on a local ballot was worth a story. In 2024 they were spread across the metropolitan map and into regional centres, standing for the major parties and as independents.

A field that size tells you a community has crossed a threshold. With nearly a million India-born residents nationally, and dense clusters in the outer growth suburbs, the diaspora now has both the population and the confidence to field candidates rather than wait to be canvassed by them. Standing for council is usually the first formal step into Australian public life, and in 2024 a great many people took it at once.

The Indian-origin councillors who got in

Winning is the harder half, and enough won to make a pattern. Around ten councillors of Indian origin were elected or re-elected across New South Wales in 2024, and they did not come from any single party. In Blacktown, one of the country’s largest and most diverse councils, Moninder Singh and Susai Benjamin were returned for Labor while Pradeep Pathi won for the Liberals. Reena Jethi held her seat for the Liberals in The Hills Shire, and Indian-origin councillors were also returned in Camden and Ku-ring-gai.

The cross-party spread matters more than the raw count. A community whose candidates all sit with one party gets taken for granted by that party and written off by the other. Indian-Australians winning as both Labor and Liberal councillors make the community a contest, and being contested is a far stronger long-term position than being loyal.

The reach ran well beyond Sydney too. In the Hunter Valley, Rohit Mahajan was re-elected to Muswellbrook Shire Council for a second term, described by community media as the first person of Indian origin to hold the role in the region. His win is significant precisely because Muswellbrook is nobody’s idea of a diaspora heartland. Indian-Australian representation now reaches coal country, which says the community’s political footprint is widening rather than merely deepening in a few safe pockets.

The Parramatta milestone

For a sense of how far this has already come, look at Parramatta, the administrative heart of Greater Sydney. In May 2023, Councillor Sameer Pandey became the City of Parramatta’s first Lord Mayor of Indian origin, having first been elected to the council in 2017 and served as deputy the year before. He was returned as a councillor at the 2024 election.

Pandey’s path is the classic migrant-to-mayor arc: a background in IT and small business, a profile built in the local Labor branch, years of unglamorous council work, then the top ceremonial role in one of the fastest-growing economic centres in the country. For a community whose numbers have long outrun its visibility in public office, an Indian-origin Lord Mayor of Parramatta was plain evidence that the ceiling had lifted.

Why local government comes first

There are practical reasons the diaspora’s political rise is showing up at council level before Parliament. Local government sits closest to the community, with smaller electorates, cheaper campaigns and issues, roads, rates, planning, libraries, waste, that touch migrant families directly. A first-generation professional who would never contest a federal seat can realistically run for council in a suburb where they are already known, and win on local standing rather than party machinery. It is also the level where a loss costs least and teaches most, which suits a first campaign.

The growth-belt councils are also simply where the population lives. Melbourne’s western and south-eastern councils, including fast-growing areas like Wyndham and Casey with large Indian communities, and Sydney’s western councils around Blacktown and Parramatta, hold Indian-Australian populations big enough that representation becomes arithmetic as much as ambition. Once a community forms a large share of a ward, it eventually elects its own. Councils are where that arithmetic converts into office first, and where the next generation of state and federal candidates is quietly serving its apprenticeship.

What it means here

For Indian-Australians, the 2024 council results are worth more than a proud headline. They answer, in a working way, the question of whether the community can convert economic success into political voice. The people deciding where a new library goes, how a growth suburb gets planned, or whether a Diwali event receives council backing now increasingly include someone who knows the community from the inside. Representation at that level changes how a council reads its own residents, from consultation offered in the right languages to festivals that get official support instead of a polite refusal.

Overstating it would be a mistake. Ten councillors and a record candidate field are a beginning, not an arrival, and holding office brings scrutiny, factional politics and the ordinary risk of failure every politician carries. The direction, though, is hard to miss. A community that arrived in large numbers within a single generation is helping to run the places where it settled, starting at the level where government is closest to the street. Lasting political representation is usually built exactly this way, from the council up.

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Related reading: India is now Australia’s largest overseas-born community.