Breaking the ice over breakfast

The recent breakfast meeting that Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan hosted for Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at the Kerala House in New Delhi seemed to signal a thaw in relations between the southern State and the Centre, especially on the financial front. Even if we were to discount the acrimonious relationship that the Kerala government had with the previous Governor, Arif Mohammed Khan, to see Mr. Arlekar accompanying Mr. Vijayan to the meeting was unexpected. Last year, in the aftermath of the destructive July 30 landslides in north Kerala’s Wayanad district, the Pinarayi government also criticised the Centre for allegedly failing to support the State’s rehabilitation efforts with monetary aid. Over a five-year period, the State government’s relations with the Raj Bhavan under Mr. Khan had also steadily crumbled, with both sides taking the battle out into the open. From there, the Kerala government’s relations with the Raj Bhavan under Mr. Arlekar — a Sangh Parivar veteran and former Governor of Himachal Pradesh and Bihar who succeeded Mr. Khan on January 2 — seem to have shifted swiftly to the pleasanter end of the spectrum.