New Delhi: In 2016, a major political scandal erupted over whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational degrees from Delhi University and Gujarat University were authentic. Arvind Kejriwal, then the Delhi chief minister, wrote to the Central Information Commission (CIC), demanding that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) make Modi’s degree public under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.This ignited a national debate, with allegations, counter-allegations and press conferences by political parties.Posted in the PMO in New Delhi, Hiren Joshi, Modi’s officer on special duty, reached out to then vice chancellor of Gujarat University, M.N. Patel, on WhatsApp.The day the CIC directed universities to share information regarding Modi’s degrees, Patel – while refusing to share marksheets – told reporters that six months ago, he had sent details of Modi’s qualification to Hiren Joshi in the PMO via WhatsApp. He said, “I can give copies to the media if I am directed [to do] so by the PMO or the CIC.”This is what Joshi, Modi’s Man Friday, is known for: crisis management. Even before Modi assumed the prime minister’s chair in 2014, Joshi has been with Modi like his ever-present shadow doing what others would not or could not. For almost a decade into Modi’s tenure, nearly no one knew what Joshi did. No one had even seen him. On the prime minister’s website, he was listed as joint secretary along with his other staff. Some labelled him as Modi’s media advisor. Some called him his tech guy. The world saw him for the first time when a candid photograph featuring him was released on the sidelines of the 2023 G-20 meet in India.For this story, The Wire reached out to over a dozen editors and reporters, some who have spoken about Joshi publicly in the past. However, everyone hesitated to recall their conversations with him. A journalist who has met with Joshi a couple of times called him Modi’s ‘gatekeeper’. He said Joshi, a direct yet soft-spoken lieutenant, was very mindful of the prime minister’s image and closely read what the press was writing.Arun Shourie, journalist and politician formerly associated with the BJP, was one of the first people to mention Joshi publicly in 2017. He said, “Modi has a whole team in the Prime Minister’s Office headed by a guy called Hiren Joshi…whose only job is to watch social media and keep the prime minister informed.”The retreatSince early December, social media has been abuzz with whispers around Joshi’s sacking. These whispers soon turned into full-blown speculation. Into this rising storm, came a new wave of unverified viral claims linking him to Mahadev app, an illicit betting-app network.This betting app was a high-profile platform for illegal online gambling and is a major subject of an ongoing money laundering investigation by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in India. Some politicians and journalists also questioned the PMO’s proximity to a woman, alleging political patronage.Amid all this, Pawan Khera, chief spokesperson of the Congress party, also raised alarms about Joshi in a press conference. He accused Joshi of being an extremely powerful figure inside the PMO. He demanded transparency and said, “The country has the right to know what business was Hiren Joshi doing while sitting in the PMO…which betting-app was it? What foreign partners did he have? If the government does not clarify, it is obvious these discussions will continue.”The Print, one of the few outlets to report on Khera’s allegations, briefly carried the story before it vanished from its website – an omission that highlights the pressure felt by the media under Modi. India now ranks 151 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. In Modi’s era, the power over information has tightened into a centralised machinery where messages are crafted, curated and released with calculated precision. At the heart of this ecosystem stands Joshi, the prime minister’s discreet yet formidable media aide.Critics and political leaders paint a far darker picture – one in which Joshi sits at the heart of BJP’s propaganda machinery. Many journalists allege that he choreographs the nightly debates on television, choosing which flames to fan and which truths to bury. He also decides the national news agenda before news breaks. Many journalists privately claim that he keeps dossiers on Modi’s critics, tracking their posts, their patterns, even the private corners of their lives. It is also an open secret that Joshi commands the loyalty of BJP’s IT Cell, a digital ‘troll army’ known to influence trends, drown dissent and smother inconvenient facts under waves of coordinated outrage.In November, the chatter about Joshi began with the abrupt resignation of Hitesh Jain from the Law Commission, a move officially confirmed but unexplained.The Real Face of Facebook, a book by journalists Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, notes that since 2009 both Joshi and Jain have been close associates. Jain is connected with Bluekraft Digital Foundation. The Foundation has been linked to a disinformation website titled “The True Picture”, has published books authored by Modi, and produced campaign videos for NaMo Television, a 24-hour cable TV channel dedicated to promoting Modi. Jain did not respond to The Wire’s email seeking an interview regarding this story.On December 2, another crack was reported as former IAS officer Navneet Sehgal abruptly resigned as the board chairperson of Prasar Bharati, the autonomous public broadcaster that runs services like Doordarshan and All India Radio. A journalist requesting anonymity confirmed that Sehgal oversaw the hiring of Joshi’s blue-eyed journalist Sudhir Chaudhry as editor-in-chief of DD News at a mega package.The gossip soon went from social media to the floors of parliament, where Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi publicly pressed the government for answers from the PMO.Online, the narratives only grew murkier. Some accounts insisted he had been quietly shown the door, while others claimed he had been restored to his post.A Congress politician on condition of anonymity alleged that the political speculation grew so fevered that a new theory emerged — that Navneet Sehgal, long known for handling public-relations crises in Uttar Pradesh (UP), may have stepped down voluntarily to signal his availability for a larger role within the PMO. While reporting on his abrupt resignation, The Print labelled Sehgal a “troubleshooter” for the UP government, particularly known for his sharp media management skills. Sehgal did not respond to The Wire’s WhatsApp message seeking an interview.Journalists across several newsrooms say that a quiet understanding exists about Joshi. Those who refuse to fall in line risk their jobs, while those who do as he says are more likely to find favour.A journalist, speaking off the record, alleged that a news anchor seen as loyal to Joshi was quietly rewarded when her husband, a senior official, received a coveted posting in the National Capital Region.In an essay, ‘Sending my Son to Exile’, Tavleen Singh – who has openly supported Modi – said when journalist Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizens of India card was cancelled, initially she assumed that the Union government’s move was a misunderstanding and tried to get in touch with the Ministry of Home Affairs. She said, “However, the repeated attempts to get in touch with the ministry or Hiren Joshi, in the Prime Minister’s Office, were in vain.”“It was then that I realised that somebody very high up wanted revenge on Aatish,” Singh wrote in 2019. “This had been a niggling fear at the back of my mind ever since he wrote that article in Time magazine that appeared on the cover with a distorted sketch of Narendra Modi and the words, ‘Divider in Chief’.”Critics claim that through Joshi’s hot and cold antics, oscillating between patronage and punishment, Indian journalists have learned to report what would be rewarded and what would be punished. Subramanian Swamy, a senior BJP leader, echoed this in a tweet,“The gagging of Indian media by Modi through his underling Hiren Joshi of PMO almost made the media complicit like Pavlov’s dog.” In psychologist Ivan Pavlov’s experiments, dogs were conditioned to respond automatically to stimuli without conscious thought.In early 2017 an email sent by Hindustan Times editor Shishir Gupta to Joshi was made public through RTI disclosures. In his email, with the subject line,“KEJRIWAL AGAINST CENTRE”, the Hindustan Times journalist listed nine specific decisions taken by the then Delhi chief minister and called them “examples of violations by Kejriwal”. Frontline magazine reported that the email was drafted in such a manner that it did not seek a response from the BJP president or the PMO, but only passed on information.Subsequently in 2022, Kejriwal talked openly about Joshi’s meddling. He alleged that Joshi sent abusive messages to media houses and warned news channel owners and editors not to give coverage to his Aam Aadmi Party.The riseWhile Joshi had always been close to Modi, he still had to fight for his position in the PMO. In 2014, as Modi transitioned from Gujarat to Delhi, he showed no signs of appointing a media adviser. Journalist Coomi Kapoor noted, “Instead a self-effacing, discreet, 70-year-old former information officer, Jagdish Thakkar, who worked in Gandhinagar with Modi, has been summoned to Delhi to act as his public relations officer.”She added, “In Gujarat, Modi worked on a media model where the guiding principle was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. The media would be provided whatever information the CM desired, but off-the-record briefings and requests for exclusive information or even permission to visit the CM’s office or the secretariat was discouraged.”While Thakkar managed the press releases, Modi’s Twitter account was handled by Joshi. Journalist Dhirenda K. Jha noted that there was a great deal of competition – and apparently a silent war of egos – between Thakkar and Joshi. Both were primarily responsible for building the prime minister’s image: the former in conventional media and the latter on the internet.He noted, “…the PMO under Modi has been churning out press releases and brief SMS messages based on these releases. Because they’re coming in fast and furious, lapses in coordination have become rather frequent. Both Thakkar and Joshi reportedly blame each other for these lapses.”Joshi became a key point person for Modi in the South Block when Thakkar died in 2018.In Modi’s second term, Joshi’s writ extended way beyond information technology and social media. He was assisted by two young professionals, Nirav Shah and Yash Rajiv Gandhi. It was Joshi who made Modi one of the most followed politicians globally on social media.Many accounts trace Joshi’s roots to an RSS family, and describe him as an electronics engineer from Pune who went on to earn a PhD from the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior. Before politics drew him in, Joshi spent more than 18 years teaching as an assistant professor at the Manikya Lal Verma Textile and Engineering College in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara.His life changed abruptly in 2008 when Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, attended a function for computer engineers. As journalist Rajdeep Sardesai recounts in 2014: The Election That Changed India, a technical glitch brought the event to a halt – until Joshi stepped forward and fixed it on the spot. The quiet display of competence impressed Modi enough for him to hand-pick Joshi as his officer on special duty. From that moment on, Joshi became the guardian of Modi’s digital presence, taking charge of his social media and tech strategy. He not just designed Modi’s digital presence, but also took care of Modi’s Gujarat successor Anandiben Patel’s website.It’s widely reported that Joshi meets Modi every morning and gives him a distilled report of India’s social media chatter. He brings not just updates but also the voices of party workers and ordinary people from across the country. Using a battery of analytical tools, he maps out the prime minister’s day. When Modi hits the campaign trail, or any international tour, Joshi is almost always by his side.Sardesai in his book noted that Modi was so clued in to what people were saying on Twitter that when Sardesai’s wife and then colleague Sagarika Ghose tweeted about Modi’s wife, Modi said to Sardesai over the phone, “Arre, tum aur tumhari biwi aaj kal bahut Twitter pe ho! (You and your wife are on Twitter a lot!)” Those tweets by Ghose had led to a rebuke from the CNN-IBN channel’s management. She was asked not to be critical of Modi on Twitter.Speaking to The Wire, journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta briefly talked about Joshi. He said, “I have never met Hiren Joshi but I have reasons to believe until very recently he was one of the most powerful persons in India. This whole ecosystem of BJP IT Cell is not headed by Amit Malviya. The mastermind is Hiren Joshi. I know that he would contact anchors of news channels who support the government, channels which journalist Ravish Kumar calls “godi media”.”A senior editor with over two decades of experience, reflecting on Joshi’s imprint on the TV news landscape, recalled, “During the coronavirus outbreak, the extreme sensationalisation around the Tablighi Jamaat and the terms like ‘corona jihad’ and other inflammatory labels appeared repeatedly on primetime shows — [that] was, in my view, a narrative pushed from the very top,” he said, adding that it was “an open secret that many editors from both Hindi and English TV channels received WhatsApp messages from the PMO for weeks, urging sharper focus on the Muslim community”. Weeks of frenzy on the majority of mainstream TV news turned the Tablighi Jamaat episode into a sensational, communalised narrative, often presenting Muslims collectively as responsible for rising COVID cases. This coverage had long-lasting social consequences, and was later criticised by courts, researchers and press bodies.The editor further claimed that the same pattern resurfaced months later during the Bihar elections, when the political atmosphere was charged after actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death. “To extract electoral mileage, Joshi orchestrated an aggressive witch-hunt of his partner Rhea Chakraborty,” the editor alleged. The screen to screen sensationalism that lasted for two months, turning a mental health issue into a national spectacle, led to regulatory bodies and the judiciary rebuking the media.Thakurta further noted in his book that Joshi did not merely oversee the BJP’s IT Cell; he also exercised significant influence over Big Tech platforms. In 2020, after Facebook’s public policy chief Ankhi Das resigned amid allegations of favouritism toward the BJP, Shivnath Thukral was elevated to head the company’s India and South Asia operations. His appointment raised eyebrows in media circles because of his past association with Opalina Technologies – a firm that developed digital tools for Modi, the PMO, the BJP and the Union Ministry of Textiles. Although Thukral has served as Meta’s vice president of public policy, he had reportedly worked closely with Joshi in earlier years, adding another layer of intrigue to the ecosystem of political and corporate influence.The Wire reached out to Meta to ask about Thukral’s role and his existing relationship with senior officials, as well as about whether the Union government is involved in pushing particular content. “These seem to be dated issues which we have clarified publicly repeatedly,” a Meta spokesperson responded, directing the reporter towards an old statement.This bubble of former associations, political proximity, and tech-platform influence burst in 2025 with resignations across the board. Thakural left Meta before the resignations of Hitesh Jain and Navneet Sehgal.A politician with 15 years in the job in Delhi said, “Things went south after Operation Sindoor.”After terrorist attacks in Pahalgam of Kashmir which led to 26 deaths, India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, carrying out coordinated strikes on multiple targets inside Pakistan. Tensions escalated swiftly, with both countries mobilising troops along the Line of Control. Four days later, US President Donald Trump posted on social media claiming he had personally brokered peace between India and Pakistan – a declaration that immediately ignited controversy. Media management around Operation Sindoor – with Big Media loudly shouting about India having captured Karachi and Lahore – greatly embarassed the Union government in terms of both global publicity and the armed forces getting rattled and distracted by false media narratives in the middle of the battle.The politician who requested anonymity said, “Narendra Modi’s “Vishwaguru” image is a very dear idea to him. Hiren has carefully cultivated it since 2014 through Modi’s high-visibility diplomacy: massive diaspora events abroad, the portrayal of India as a global problem-solver, yoga diplomacy, vaccine diplomacy during COVID, and the triumphal hosting of the G20 in 2023. It projected Modi not merely as India’s prime minister but as a statesman shaping global discourse.”However, that carefully constructed image took an unexpected hit when Trump decided to keep repeating the claim that he had personally brokered the ceasefire. Even though the Indian government firmly denied any foreign mediation, the mere existence of Trump’s claim created a perception problem. Modi’s critics and the media asked, if India truly were a Vishwaguru, why would it need outside intervention at a moment of national crisis?The resulting online slugfest, amplified by troll networks and international commentary, made it appear as though India’s strategic autonomy had been compromised. Modi’s Vishwaguru aura had cracked under the weight of an unexpected foreign claim and a chaotic information battle.The politician added, “Modi blamed Joshi. His crisis manager could not manage that crisis. Modi’s image, that he deeply cares for, had already taken a hit after the 2024 elections. Hiren was unable to counter perception about Modi’s dictatorial attitude. If anything, dismantling the Vishwaguru’s image became the final nail in the coffin in their relationship. Since then, Hiren’s responsibilities were downsized in the PMO.”A former journalist who spoke off the record said, “Pratik Doshi, another officer on special duty in Modi’s PMO, grabbed the open position. Doshi used to be responsible for the research and strategy wing in the PMO. The tussle between Joshi and Doshi increased when the media portfolio was given to Doshi.” Doshi is finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s son-in-law. Pratik Doshi and the PMO have not responded to The Wire’s queries sent through a registered post seeking a detailed response.A senior political consultant working with a leading politician in India confirmed the tussle in the PMO in an off-the-record interview. He said, “Last I heard, November 13 was supposed to be Hiren’s last working day. He had started divesting his responsibility to other people. I think he was being sent back to Gujarat. As he is such a powerful person, he could not be removed cold turkey. He has to be accommodated somewhere. I think, Modi would have accented him to Rajya Sabha or something. It was all happening quietly.”He added, “But somewhere something blew up. In the first week of November, gossip about Hiren’s demotion started. Eventually, someone leaked information about Hiren Joshi right when parliament was in session to create pressure on Modi. I think Modi cannot dispose of him as easily as he thought. He would have to keep Hiren for some more time till the political gossip stops. Even Hiren’s retention is now complicated. His cover is blown. He is now a public figure.”The Wire reached out to Hiren Joshi through registered post and WhatsApp seeking a detailed response. The story would be updated if he responds.Regarding the allegations of a betting scam, the former journalist who has seen Hiren’s work closely since 2023 added, “Modi shunting him out because of corruption is such a silly accusation. In such a case, he would have to shunt out everybody in the PMO. Anyone in the PMO could make a reasonable amount of money for something as basic as access to the PM. However, I think there was quiet jealousy against Joshi in the PMO. He was in Modi’s ears. Even senior government officials in other ministries joked how Joshi, a joint secretary rank officer, could get something done through the PM so easily. At one point of time Joshi could draw on the resources of all 70 to 80 officers in the PMO. Joshi was very powerful. His power lied in the fact that he was an open secret.”He added, “Secrecy is a strategy adopted by Modi’s senior appointees. When you have a despot on top, it is best to not make yourself too prominent. Everyone in PMO flies under the radar. It’s in no one’s interest to be public.”Srishti Jaswal is an independent journalist.This story was updated at 8:35 PM on December 18, 2025.