From hunting for a fax machine to drop a press release, to crafting Instagram reels for millions — Prime Minister Narendra Modi's arc through India's media landscape spans four transformative decades, and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta put that journey front and centre on Thursday, November 12, 2026, sharing a striking quote from the PM on how political communication has been utterly reinvented.

The fax-machine era PM Modi remembers

The quote shared by CM Gupta captures a vivid slice of Indian political life in the early 1990s. 'Press release से लेकर Insta reel release तक' — 'From press release to Insta reel release' — Modi recalls being entrusted with the responsibility of coordinating arrangements across the country for two major journeys during that period. 'That was an era,' the PM is quoted as saying, 'when you had to hunt for a fax machine just to send a press release.'

It is a detail that lands with surprising force. India in the early 1990s was a country of scarce telephony, nascent cable television, and virtually no digital infrastructure. A party organiser needing to relay information across states had to physically locate a fax terminal — no small task in smaller cities and towns — before a single line of text could travel faster than a courier.

Four decades, four revolutions in one career

Narendra Modi has been a senior figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party since the 1980s, rising through organisational ranks before becoming Chief Minister of Gujarat and later Prime Minister in 2014. His career therefore spans every major wave of Indian media: the print-and-All India Radio era, the satellite television explosion of the mid-1990s, the mobile internet surge of the 2010s, and now the short-video age of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

That personal continuity — one leader, four media paradigms — is precisely what makes the anecdote resonate beyond nostalgia. Indian political parties began systematic social-media outreach in the early 2010s, and the BJP in particular invested heavily in digital infrastructure ahead of the 2014 general elections. The contrast with fax-era logistics could not be more stark: a post today reaches tens of millions of followers in seconds.

Why CM Gupta's repost matters

Delhi's Chief Minister sharing the quote is itself a small act of political communication — using a platform-native tool (an X repost) to amplify a message about the evolution of platform-native tools. The accompanying video in the original post suggests the remarks were drawn from a speech or public address, though specific details of the event have not been confirmed.

For media professionals and political communicators watching how India's ruling establishment thinks about outreach, the signal is clear: senior leadership is openly contextualising its own digital fluency as hard-won, not assumed — earned across decades of adapting to whatever communication technology the moment demanded.

From a fax machine scavenged in some district office in the early 1990s to a reel that lands on a billion screens — that is the distance Indian political communication has travelled. And by the PM's own account, he walked every step of it.