Modi poses for a selfie during the Diwali bash. (PTI)

New Delhi, Oct. 25: Last April, the White House had banned all selfies taken with the President.

The provocation was baseball star David Ortiz’s repeated re-tweets of a selfie he had clicked with Barack Obama during a team visit to the White House. Washington suspected it might be a publicity stunt for a corporate conglomerate.

Narendra Modi need have no such fear.

At a Diwali bash hosted by the BJP for journalists today on the lawns of a bungalow abutting its headquarters, selfies with the Prime Minister were in huge demand. Modi wore a shell pink tussar silk kurta with a jacket that was two shades of pink deeper.

Young women from the print and electronic media badgered him to pose for selfies with them. Modi, who had so far kept a safe distance from the Delhi media, not just obliged but peeked into the cameras to see the outcome of their efforts.

Soon, these journalists’ Twitter handles were awash with these Modi pictures. It prompted a nasty tweet or two from his cyber fans about a tribe that has purportedly been viscerally anti-Modi since the 2002 riots now jostling to catch his eye and getting snapped with him.

At the venue’s sanitised precincts, where guests were sniffed by dogs and searched by elite security personnel, Modi made his first outreach to the capital’s media, though a tentative one.

He spoke briefly from a dais he shared with party president Amit Shah, general secretary J.P. Nadda, and cabinet ministers Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj and Prakash Javadekar.

He took no questions but, after dismounting, met each journalist personally, first the editors seated around tables in the first two rows and then the foot soldiers on the BJP beat.

To the handful who knew him as a BJP general secretary in the 1990s, he maintained he was still “the same old Modi” even if they perhaps viewed him through a different prism now.

Asked whether he would hold more substantive interactions with the media, the Prime Minister’s answer was: “But here I am, interacting with you.”

In his address, he spoke of his “humble” origins in the BJP. “Till the other day, I used to place the chairs for the media on such occasions,” Modi said, recalling that his “old links” with the press corps “helped me in Gujarat”.

“I wish to revive and deepen those links again. I’m trying to figure out how I can make time for the media, because a face-to-face meeting might be particularly helpful for me to get information and fresh perspectives on issues,” he said.

Former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi would occasionally invite journalists for the same reason: to solicit information and political analyses.

Modi, whose equations with the media have been patchy , thanked journalists for their coverage of the Swachh Bharat mission.

“Your pen has transformed into a broom. Your coverage has forced errant governments to wake up. For the first time, even veteran columnists have written on the sanitation issue,” he claimed.