On 3 May last year, as the world celebrated World Press Freedom Day, and there were 13 days left for the general election that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power, Narendra Modi, then the party’s prime ministerial candidate, tweeted:

Modi’s tweet referred to an interview he had sat for that had been conducted by Doordarshan—an autonomous public service broadcaster founded by the Indian central government in 1959—at Gandhinagar in Gujarat on 26 April 2014. The BJP alleged that the interview had been edited before it was aired and that portions had been removed. This happened, the party claimed, because of what Modi had said regarding his friendship with Ahmed Patel—political secretary to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi—and his comments on Sonia Gandhi’s daughter, Priyanka Gandhi. The ensuing uproar over these accusations led to a tussle between Prasar Bharati—the public broadcaster that administers the All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan—and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), over the ministry’s interference in the news divisions of both AIR and Doordarshan.

It was amidst this chaos that Modi had taken recourse to Twitter on 3 May. In a three-part series that highlighted his concern for the autonomy of the press, he delivered this parting shot: