It’s vanishingly uncommon for Narendra Modi to immediately area stay questions from the press all through a close to decade in energy. So when the Indian prime minister took two questions from reporters at a White House press occasion with Mr. Biden on Thursday, it was a notable second.

From the beginning of his time in workplace, Mr. Modi and his workers have been fastidious about controlling his message, and attempting to manage the media, usually. Though he loves speeches at public occasions, and has leaned into his monthly radio show as a approach to ship messages to the nation, any publicity to unscripted occasions had been a rarity earlier than the White House occasion, and doubtless can be once more afterward.

Mr. Modi’s aides insist that social media, which his occasion’s huge communications equipment has mastered, has made news conferences redundant. And different arms of the federal government do have interaction with reporters.

Mr. Modi’s shying away from media engagement goes again to his time as chief minister of Gujarat a long time in the past. Under his watch, the state broke into widespread riots in 2002, and Mr. Modi was accused of trying away — and even enabling — Hindu mobs who went on lethal rampages in Muslim neighborhoods.

Mr. Modi had lengthy rejected any wrongdoing. But he has additionally publicly stated that his largest failure throughout that point was that he couldn’t management the media — one thing he has assiduously pursued since then.

Dangling incentives of presidency promoting and making use of the strain ways of tax raids and arrests, he has bent giant sections of India’s media, notably broadcast media, to his will to such an extent that almost all shops confine themselves to doling out his official line.

In 2015, Mr. Modi did take a few questions throughout a joint news convention with President Barack Obama. In current years, maybe the closest he has come to taking part in a proper news convention was on the day of his re-election in 2019, the place he appeared on the rostrum for one. But even then, he solely made a gap assertion. Who answered the precise questions? His right-hand man, Amit Shah, who’s now India’s highly effective house minister.