On the last day of the year, with New Year festivities on the anvil, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) led by principal secretary to Prime Minister Dr PK Mishra and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, was preparing for a rapid fire round on January 1 with PM Narendra Modi scheduled to take a review meeting with top officials at 10.30am, people aware of the matter said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (PTI)
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Modi has told the top officials that since he was busy in election campaigning in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram for assembly elections and then in launching of various projects in Ayodhya, a follow-up is needed on what was done on various projects monitored by the PMO.
The officials, therefore, brushed up their project files in case the PM chose to question them on priority projects. While one part of the PMO was readying for meeting, another section was preparing for the DGP/IGP internal security conference in Jaipur on January 5-6, which follows a peace agreement with ULFA, officials said.
The PMO is also involved in preparations for the biennial Vibrant Gujarat summit on January 10-12 in Gandhinagar. This year, the summit will be attended by UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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