He Takes No Questions. The World Answers Anyway.

In Auckland this July, a New Zealand journalist did something straightforward. He asked why, after visiting three countries on a foreign tour, the Prime Minister of India had not once taken questions from the press.

He did not get to ask the Prime Minister directly, of course. Instead, he put his question to an Indian official at a briefing. The official gave an answer that was likely more candid than intended. He said it was not his place to comment on the Prime Minister's political strategy, but then did so anyway. According to him, the Prime Minister is a typical successful Indian politician who prefers to speak directly to the people instead of through intermediaries. He added that most Indian voters live in rural areas and value that direct connection.

Think about that answer, because it explains everything. A foreign journalist asked why India avoids the world's press, and the Indian official basically said the Prime Minister is focused on speaking to Indian villagers. He was not dodging the question. He was being completely honest. The message was never intended for the person asking. He was simply in the wrong room.

Except there is no longer a wrong room.

I have helped build the kind of machine that led to that answer. Let me explain what you are seeing. It is not about shyness or arrogance, no matter what foreign columnists might say. It is a tool doing exactly what it was designed for, just not in the setting it was meant for.

The fact, plainly

Since becoming Prime Minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has not held an open press conference in India. This is not just a gap; it is longer than the entire time in office of most world leaders. In May 2019, he attended one but did not take any questions. When abroad, he rarely faces unscripted questions. The few exceptions, like taking questions in Washington with Joe Biden in 2023 and Donald Trump in 2025, happened only because the host's format made it unavoidable. If the setting can be controlled, it is. If not, it is avoided.

This July, the tour included Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. The previous European tour covered Norway and the Netherlands. At each stop, local journalists asked the same question, not out of hostility, but confusion. In Norway, a journalist who asked was criticised online by the Prime Minister's supporters, including mainstream Indian media, showing how the system reacts to unplanned questions. In Australia, a correspondent told viewers that this carefully managed event was likely the closest anyone would get, since the Prime Minister is known for avoiding unscripted moments.

None of this is hidden. It is all public knowledge. What should interest us, more than it seems to interest those who complain, is that this approach actually works.

Two rooms, one trip

While the foreign press focused on the lack of answers, Indian media portrayed the trip as a major success.

The same three-nation tour that got little attention in Australian or New Zealand media was shown nonstop on Indian TV as a great achievement, with the Prime Minister welcomed warmly everywhere. One Indian outlet even explained the process: since foreign coverage was limited, Indian coverage filled the gap, using the diaspora events as a recurring highlight.

Consider what this means. One event in one week created two very different stories, depending on which country's TV you watched or the newspapers you read. In one version, the leader took no questions and made little impact. In the other, he was seen as a winner abroad. Both stories were shown, but only one was believed by its intended audience, and that audience was always us, not foreigners.

This is what the official in Auckland was honest about. Everything- the staging, the diaspora events, the drone footage, the highlight reels the Prime Minister shares before leaving- is directed inward. It targets voters in places like Gorakhpur, not editors in Sydney. The foreign trip is really a domestic broadcast, just filmed abroad.

The wall is gone

For most of the television age, this worked perfectly, because the two audiences never met. The foreign correspondent filed for readers in Sydney. The Indian channel broadcast to viewers in Gorakhpur. Two versions of the same week, and neither audience ever saw the other's. You could run a triumph at home and a shrug abroad at the same time, and pay nothing for the contradiction.

That wall has been gone for a decade. The machine is still built as if it stands.

Look at what actually happened in Norway. The journalist who asked why there was no press conference, Helle Lyng, was trolled online by the Prime Minister's supporters, including star anchors of Indian media outlets. She was called a spy and worse; her phone number was passed around, and her Instagram account was suspended. Reporters Without Borders had to issue a statement before it was restored. And it was the trolling, not her question, that became the story. It travelled. It was picked up, discussed and reported, and by the end of it, a lot of people in Europe who had never given a thought to Indian press practices had learnt two things: the Indian Prime Minister does not take questions, and if you ask why, his followers will come after you. And this trolling continues even today as I write this piece.

Do the simple arithmetic on that. A press conference in Oslo would have been a twenty-minute item, covered by a few outlets, forgotten in a week. Avoiding it produced a story that ran longer, reached further, and that India controlled none of. The avoidance cost more than the answer would have.

And it was not the foreign press that carried it. It was our own supporters, doing at home what works at home, in an arena where it does not. The machinery built to win the domestic argument reached across the border and did the damage itself, at speed, for free.

None of this is new either. In June 2023, at that rare Washington press conference beside Joe Biden, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Sabrina Siddiqui asked Modi about the treatment of religious minorities in India. He answered her. Then his supporters went after her online, and the harassment was severe enough that the White House and the White House Correspondents' Association both condemned it in public.

Set that next to Oslo. Avoid the question, and the avoidance becomes a story that travels. Answer the question, and the person who asked it is attacked, and that becomes a story that travels. Three years apart, on two continents, with two very different formats, the same machinery produced the same result. The room was never really the problem. What happens after the room is the problem.

This is what social media has done to the craft, and it is the part the Indian state has not absorbed. Television has a border: a footprint, a language, a market, a regulator. Social media has none. The clip of the unanswered question, the screenshot of the abuse, the correspondent's aside to camera, all of it lands in the same feed, in front of an audience that is Indian and foreign at once and does not sort itself by nationality. There is no domestic or international broadcast any more. There is only broadcast.

So the logic of the two rooms has quietly inverted. You can no longer say one thing to Gorakhpur and nothing to Sydney, because Sydney is reading Gorakhpur's timeline. The staging still works on the people it was built for. It just does not stay with them.

The one room the machine cannot enter

Here is why the press conference matters so much more than it looks.

Every machine I have helped create works in one direction: sending out a message. It means choosing words carefully, controlling the setting, deciding who appears where, and never letting someone unpredictable take the microphone. This is not a mistake in political communication; it is the core of it. The whole skill is about managing the message on your own terms.

A free press conference is the one place where this machine fails. Its purpose is to take control away from you, so you cannot predict the next question. For a machine built on controlling the message, a press conference is not a stage; it is a risk, and the logical response is to avoid it.

So the machine avoids press conferences. At home, it can do this because the domestic press has, over time, stopped pushing for them. Abroad, it simply avoids scheduling them. At home, there is no cost, since voters are not waiting to see the Prime Minister answer tough questions from foreign journalists. They are watching the big events instead.

But abroad, there is a real cost. The empty podium becomes the story. If you do not answer questions, the lack of answers becomes the headline, and you let others shape your reputation.

Even the big diaspora events in places like Jakarta, Auckland, and Kuala Lumpur are not really exceptions. The crowds are mostly Indians, making it a domestic audience in a foreign setting. The Prime Minister is not addressing foreigners in those stadiums. He is speaking to Indians, both those present and those watching back home. The entire production is aimed at people who already support India, not at foreigners whose opinions could actually be changed by the visit.

That is the main problem. India has a powerful way to communicate with itself, but almost nothing for reaching others. I have written before about the Vishwaguru with a classroom that has no windows and no door. Every year the lecture gets louder. The room stays shut.

What a good answer looks like

Let me tell you about a room I was in.

In July 2012, TIME put then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on its Asia cover under a single word: Underachiever. It was brutal packaging, and at home the opposition used it exactly as you would expect. It was a stick, and they picked it up.

Soon after, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, then Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and a leader of that same opposition, was in the United States. American journalist asked him the obvious question. Was India's Prime Minister an underachiever? It was a free hit. He was from the rival party, he was on foreign soil, and the magazine had done the work for him. All he had to do was agree.

He did not. He said the man was the Prime Minister of India, not the Prime Minister of the Congress party, and that the Prime Minister of India could not be an underachiever.

I was in that room. The reaction was not the one anybody expected. The question was designed to produce an Indian politician attacking his own country's leader in front of a foreign audience. What it produced instead was an Indian politician defending the office in front of that audience, while quietly declining to defend the man. He gave up nothing at home. He conceded nothing abroad. And he turned a hostile question into a demonstration that Indian politics has a floor its quarrels do not travel below.

That is the craft, and it cannot be scripted, because nobody knew the question was coming. It needed a politician who could think on his feet, in that room, who understood that the audience was foreign, and who had decided in advance what he would not say abroad, whatever he was offered.

We have many such politicians. Chouhan is not unique. The capability is not missing from the country; it is missing from the strategy, because a machine built for control has no use for the one skill that requires letting go of it.

Why we built it this way

This is not just about Modi. I want to be clear, because it is too easy to blame one person and ignore the larger machine.

Every Indian government has put little effort into communicating with the world, because the incentives are different. Holding a press conference in Auckland does not win votes in Uttar Pradesh. Building a long-term reputation abroad does not show up in election results here. Outward communication brings slow and uncertain rewards, while focusing inward brings quick and big returns. So, governments invest where the votes are, and the system for outward communication never develops, no matter which party is in power.

What is different now is not the lack of effort, but the level of skill. This government is the best domestic communicator India has ever had. That is the problem: the better you get at one method, the less you notice you only have that one. When your message is loud, and the crowd is enthusiastic, it is easy to forget there are others; people who shape global opinion, who are not being reached. This success hides the gap.

There is another country that does the opposite, and it is worth mentioning even if the comparison is uncomfortable. China communicates outward with patience, planning for decades, because it does not have to answer to voters. Its lack of accountability lets it focus on the world. India's accountability, which is its real strength, always points inward, so its communication does too. The very thing that makes India a democracy also limits its voice abroad. This is not a criticism of democracy, but a reminder to recognise the cost.

What the silence costs

If you do not tell your own story, someone else will, and they will tell it worse.

India ranks 157 out of 180 on one press-freedom index, six places lower than last year. You might not trust that ranking; many Indians do not, and for good reasons. I am not asking you to accept it as final. Please note something simpler: India is not present to challenge it. Many rankings, democracy downgrades, and foreign headlines are not judgements from hostile outsiders. They fill the silence we left. When we leave the room empty, others fill it for us.

There is a detail in that index worth holding on to. It is topped by Norway and the Netherlands. Those are the two countries where journalists asked why the Indian Prime Minister does not take questions, and where his supporters answered them with abuse. The countries that know the most about a free press asked the question. The answer they got told them what to write.

Meanwhile, everyone else has built the instrument we do not have. China and Russia fund multilingual global news and information networks that run into billions. Britain treats the BBC World Service as a strategic asset and keeps adding to it. Qatar built Al Jazeera and, on most subjects, leaves its journalists alone, which is the only reason anyone believes it. India has the world's largest diaspora, its second-largest English-speaking population, and a real democratic story to tell, and nothing to tell it with. I have made that case at length elsewhere on this blog, so I will not repeat it here. The point here is narrower: no instrument, and no willingness to stand in a room and be asked. They are the same failure.

You cannot respond to criticism if you are not there to hear it. Every missed press conference is a small loss, a story we choose not to shape. Over time, these losses add up, and others end up defining the country's image. Not being present is not neutral; it sends its own message.

The honest objection

Let me make the strongest argument in favour of the machine, because there is one.

The diaspora strategy makes sense. Indians are now the largest overseas-born group in Australia, and a growing and influential community in many countries across the globe. A government that reaches out to them is making a smart political move. Foreign press conferences do carry real risks. Some questions are designed to be difficult, and reporters may be looking for a moment that will go viral. No leader enjoys these situations, and none is required to.

All of this is true. But a confident country responds anyway, because the alternative to a tough question is not silence; it is letting someone else answer for you. You do not protect your reputation by avoiding challenges. You protect it by showing up, facing tough questions, and responding well, which is exactly what Chouhan did in a room where he had every reason to do the opposite. That is what real confidence looks like. What we do now, from the outside, looks like we have something to hide, even if we do not.

The thing worth building

So here is the one judgement in this piece I will mark plainly as my own, because it is a recommendation, and not a fact.

India does not just need a better image. That is only a wish, not a plan. India needs something it does not have: a professional, permanent, and truly bipartisan way to speak to the world. It should be designed to do what the domestic machine cannot: handle questions it did not prepare.

This new approach cannot just be the domestic message aimed outward, because international audiences do not want to be lectured; they want real answers. It cannot be measured by the size of headlines at home, because credibility abroad takes years to build through consistency and openness, even when admitting mistakes. It has to move at the speed of what it is competing with, which is not the evening bulletin but the timeline, where a story sets within the hour. It also cannot be tied to election cycles, since its value is long-term and not linked to quick political gains. It should be set up like a reserve bank, protected from short-term political pressures.

None of this means we need to be less democratic. It just means recognising that our democracy has left one important task unfinished, and we need to address it on purpose, because it will not happen by chance.

The alternative is what happened in Auckland, repeated in city after city, year after year. A journalist asks a question, but gets no answer. He writes the only story he can, that nobody responded. Back home, the same silence is shown as a victory and is believed. Both stories are true, but only one is read in the country we wanted to impress, and it is not the one we created.

We have become highly skilled at speaking. We have simply forgotten how to answer questions.

Contact

tushar(at)tusharpanchal(dot)co

or

tushar(at)warroom(dot)live

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