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.”

Since 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 Wire