Delhi Confidential: In show of support, Amit Shah to have lunch at Karnataka CM’s place

Lunch meet: Karnataka Chief Minister Minister Basavaraj Bommai, who recently got a go-ahead signal for governance initiatives as well as Cabinet expansion to prepare the party for elections next year, appears to be getting more support from the central leadership. On Thursday, party circles were abuzz with talk of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Bangalore next week. Shah is expected to be in Bengaluru to attend the opening ceremony of Khelo India University Games on May 3, but what has sent a discordant signal to different factions in the state unit is the news that Shah will have lunch at Bommai’s place. Although sources close to Bommai said it will be an official meeting between the Chief Minister and Union Home Minister, many senior leaders fear it is much more than that, especially as it comes at a time when the Cabinet expansion is about to happen.

The omission: As the hype and hoopla over Prashant Kishor’s engagement with the Congress settle down, many of the Congress leaders are now ruminating on the developments that unfolded in the past 10 days or so. Some of the leaders could not help wondering why the party’s in-house data expert Praveen Chakravarty was not part of the group which engaged with Kishor, who gave a detailed data-driven presentation to the party leadership. Chakravarty, the head of the Congress’s data analytics department, is also a political economist but he is surprisingly not part of the P Chidambaram-headed group, which is drafting the economic resolution to be presented at the Udaipur Chintan Shivir next month.

In lighter vein: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar gave some sharply worded responses to European ministers and leaders during the Raisina dialogue on the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war. But when asked what keeps him up at night — essentially what preoccupied his mind most — he tried a witty reply: “The only thing that keeps me up at night is jet lag.” A diplomat for four decades before becoming a minister, Jaishankar has travelled the world on official assignments.