Dining Out: Talking Politics and Peace with the Kadris

AHMEDABAD – The Kadris, the Muslim family that hosted us for dinner, live in a farmhouse on an isolated dirt road the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The setting was a far cry from the congestion and pollution of the city we had gotten to know over the last three days. Here there was quiet and we could pick out constellations among the stars in the sky. As soon as we arrived, our hosts offered us limbu paani (lemonade).

The house was filled with people who have had political influence in Gujarat and in India. The family patriarch, 87 years old, was a Member of the Legislative Assembly when Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhabhai Patel were in power; his wife was the first Muslim female sarpanch (head of the village); their daughter works for the state government on minorities’ issues; and their son-in-law worked closely with Narendra Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat.

With a family like that, it was inevitable that the conversation revolved a lot around politics. Also, they didn’t think that religion was that much of an issue. They were Muslims, and they told us that the social compact between the different communities in their village was really strong and more important than the shallow communal differences. The father, for example, couldn’t praise Prime Minister Narendra Modi enough for his time as a chief minister of Gujarat. The father was proud to show us a photo in which he posed with Modi. That was interesting, as Modi has been much criticized for overseeing Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots in Guajrat, in which many Muslims were killed. Yet the father lauded Modi for being able to foster development in Gujarat, even though he admitted that agriculture didn’t always benefit from these improvements.

We ate outside, on a large coffee table. The dinner was composed of home-cooked dishes. It was North Gujarati fare with Bajra rotla (pear millet bread), mixed vegetable, kadhi (liquid curry made of yogurt), gota (deep fried flour snack) salad, khichdi (rustic rice preparation), and shiro (a sweet made of semolina fried in ghee). We sat at the table, and they served us the food. When one of us was done with one of the dishes, our host would swiftly refill our plates.

During the dinner, we talked a lot about politics, mostly with the son-in-law, Rizwan Kadri. It seemed like a lot of the family members were disillusioned about the relations between the media and political members. They were saying that they could barely trust any media, that a lot of journalists’ interests were intertwined with political figures’ interests.

Rizwan was passionate about his research. His work focuses on Sardar Patel and Mahatma Gandhi. After dinner, he told us about all the documents he was able to get and study: they include letters from Sardar Patel to Mahatma Gandhi, papers of Morarji Desai, and diaries of Mridula Gandhi. He gave us copies of some documents, just before driving us to a main road where we could find a cab to get back to our hotel.

More than the tasty food our hosts had prepared for us, we were lucky to be fed with a unique intellectual discussion that night, from a family whose political and academic engagement is remarkable. Besides the politics, the dinner was casual enough that we were able to get an honest insight on how it feels like to live in Gujarat as a Muslim family. Against pre-conceived notions of an endless clash between Hindus and Muslims, the very personal and intimate conversation we were able to have with this family showed us a different and little known story, the story of Muslim-Indian citizens who feel fully integrated within the Gujarati society, and who praise the BJP for developing their state. This dinner proved, once again, that stories are usually more complex than what the traditional media narrative tends to be.