Days before dinner with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan (62), clips of him at another dinner were viral: Chouhan and national Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya grasping each other by the hand and singing together lustily into karaoke mikes: “Yeh dosti, hum nahin todenge”. Like everything else, there’s a political background to this.

       In the past, Chouhan and Vijayvargiya have been political rivals. In fact, Chouhan’s supporters had flagged the BJP’s performance in the West Bengal assembly election earlier in ...