Off the PM's Plane: How India's Foreign Affairs Press Access Disappeared

Imagine the Prime Minister of India flying to a foreign country to sign deals, meet world leaders, and represent 1.4 billion citizens. Now imagine no journalist is on that plane to ask questions, verify claims, or report independently. That has been the reality in India since 2014 — and a new investigation by Newslaundry, published on 27 June 2026, digs into how this happened and what it means.

For decades before 2014, it was standard practice for a group of journalists to travel with the Prime Minister on foreign visits. This was not a privilege handed out casually — it was a democratic convention, meaning an unwritten but widely accepted norm, meant to ensure that the press could hold the government accountable even when it operated far from home. Reporters on these trips could ask questions directly, gather information independently, and provide citizens with news that went beyond the official version.

When Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, that convention ended immediately and deliberately. Nripendra Misra, who served as Modi's Principal Secretary — essentially the top bureaucrat in the Prime Minister's Office — has recalled the moment clearly. When he presented Modi with a list of journalists expected to join the first foreign trip, as was the custom, Modi questioned why reporters needed to be on the plane at all. Even when told that shutting out journalists could damage press relations, Modi was unconvinced. The instruction was firm: no journalists would travel with him. In the years since, Modi has made more than 180 foreign visits without a single journalist aboard.

The plane they are excluded from is no ordinary aircraft. Air India One is a specially modified Boeing 777-300ER — a wide-body, long-range jet — operated exclusively for the President and Prime Minister of India. The fleet cost taxpayers ₹8,400 crore, and notably, it comes equipped with a press briefing room. That room, built with public money, has gone unused for its intended purpose.

The Ministry of External Affairs, or MEA, is India's central government body responsible for foreign policy and diplomacy. It is currently headed by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. The MEA does hold formal press interactions: its spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, an Indian Foreign Service officer of the 1998 batch, has conducted routine weekly press conferences since taking over the role in January 2024. But these briefings are one of the very few formal channels left for journalists to ask questions about India's foreign policy.

In the absence of direct access, journalists covering India's foreign affairs beat — the reporters whose job is to follow diplomacy — have had to adapt in ways that compromise independence. Many now rely on WhatsApp briefing groups, where officials share pre-selected information on their own terms. Photo-ops — carefully arranged, visually dramatic moments designed for cameras — have replaced substantive interaction. Reporters end up covering the spectacle of diplomacy rather than its substance.

The Newslaundry investigation drew on interviews with journalists who covered India's foreign policy from the era of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who led the country from 1998 to 2004, right through to the present day. Their testimonies paint a picture of a beat that has been systematically managed rather than reported. A related finding from the investigation was striking: India's high-profile diplomatic delegations sent after Operation Sindoor — a recent military and diplomatic episode — received almost no coverage in major Western media outlets, suggesting a wide gap between the domestic image projected by the government and India's actual impact on the global stage.

The Newslaundry report is unlikely to force an immediate change in policy, but it adds to a growing body of scrutiny around how India manages information about its foreign affairs. As India's global diplomatic ambitions grow — seeking a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, hosting G20 summits, positioning itself as a major world power — the question of whether citizens and the world can independently verify what their government is doing abroad becomes more urgent, not less.