Who moved my Hiren bhai?

Is Hiren Joshi leaving the PMO? Is it a routine transfer? A reshuffle? An “administrative adjustment”?

Officially, mum’s the word. The PMO hasn’t put out a note, a notification, not even a polite farewell bouquet emoji for the man who has – for over a decade – shaped, sharpened and sometimes strangled India’s news cycles. 

For context, as Open Magazine once dryly noted, Hiren Joshi isn’t just part of Modi’s ecosystem – he is the ecosystem’s motherboard. Modi’s point person. The man who didn’t merely advise the PM on digital strategy but built the entire NaMo online universe from scratch. 

A former engineering professor from Bhilwara, Joshi wasn’t exactly groomed for power. He was discovered almost Bollywood-style in 2008, after fixing a tech glitch during a Modi event. Since then, he’s moved seamlessly from Gandhinagar to Delhi, shaping Modi’s online persona, and quietly keeping tabs on who in the media is behaving, and who needs a gentle nudge.

By 2014, when Modi marched into the PMO, Joshi was right behind him. By 2019, he’d risen to Joint Secretary/OSD (Comms & IT) – which in Lutyens-speak means: editors, owners, ministers, and even the BJP’s own social-media warriors prefer not to be on his blocked list.

Soft-spoken in person, omnipresent in effect, Joshi has long been described as the PM’s “eyes and ears” – the man behind the messaging, the monitoring, and, depending on who you’re asking, the pressure.

With someone like that, there are no “routine transfers.” Delhi knows this. Delhi feels this. 

And so Lutyens corridors are vibrating like a Nokia 3310 with rumours of a fallout. 

Everything, of course, lives in the sacred realm of the WhatsApp forward – a medium Hiren Joshi himself mastered and translated into primetime TRP gold. So we won’t repeat a word of that.

Then entered Pawan Khera, wagging a finger and dropping hints. At his presser yesterday, he officially made the gossip “newsworthy” by demanding transparency about Joshi’s business links and foreign ties and apparent transfer. 

Khera said Joshi is not a small name. “He is the most powerful person in the PMO who played a key role in murdering democracy in this country, in throttling you [the media].” Ouch. 

He went on to say: “The country has the right to know who his business partners are. What business was Hiren Joshi carrying out sitting in the PMO is also something that the country deserves to know.”

But we have more important questions to ask:

Agar woh nahi hain, toh phir TV channels ki script kaun likhega?

Indeed if Hiren Joshi is out, who takes over the PMO’s media command centre? Who decides the 9 PM rage topic? Who presses the “George Soros” button? Who signals that today we’re doing “Opposition Deshdrohi Edition”? Who WhatsApps anchors the 7 talking points? Who curates the daily ‘hall of shame’ list singling out those who dared to do that dastardly thing of holding power to account.

Meanwhile, in TV News HQ… Panic. Existential panic.

A senior politician told a journalist who told us (duh that’s how it works in high places): “Arrey madam, anchors are upset. Their Hiren bhai is gone. Ab unko khud story dhoondhni padegi.”

Imagine the horror. Having to find stories? Having to call sources? Journalism?? A primetime anchor's biggest nightmare. 

We don’t know if Hiren Joshi has been shunted, shifted, sidelined, promoted upwards, or sent off to design holographic AI push notifications for 2047. But we do know this: Delhi hasn’t been this alive with gossip since the fag end of UPA II and we all know how that turned out. And whatever the truth is, one thing’s clear: For a man who controlled the nation’s headlines, his own exit may be the biggest story he never got to script. 

Did we say alleged exit?