Mark tully represented the one quality that all journalists aspire to: Credibility. He died at 90, still a British citizen but in his soul and spirit, an Indian.
For many decades, he was the voice of India on the BBC World Service: Not just during the Emergency, when he broadcast stories about censorship, midnight arrests, extra-judicial killings, and was expelled, only to return 18 months later, but also during the demolition of Babri Masjid, when screaming crowds in Ayodhya chased him, chanting ”BBC murdabad” and “Mark Tully murdabad”. His reportage of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and other groups in north and east Sri Lanka, and later, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, is landmark journalism.
Indians here, and around the globe, turned to him to learn the facts about the storming of the Golden Temple, the back story of the creation of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and the anti-Sikh riots that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination.For him, writing and broadcasting about politics was never about suspending judgement or political correctness. It was always about telling the story in context.
Tully was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and went to school in Darjeeling. His father was a businessman in India when it was still a jewel in the crown. His mother’s family had been in Bangladesh for generations. He went to a public school in the United Kingdom, joined the army, took a history degree at Cambridge, and studied – unsuccessfully – to be a priest. “It was decided I was not suitable for the clergy,” he would tell the Los Angeles Times many years later. Why? “Drinking, mainly,” he replied.
In that sense, Tully sa’ab, as he was known in India, lived up to an image often associated with journalists back then.Reporters were required to be hard drinking, capable of working under grate pressure, and always on the side of the underdog. He was a beer drinker, but would never say no to a drop - or two, or three – of Jameson, the Irish whisky (earlier in life, he smoked smelly South Indian cheroots).
Andrew Whitehead, a former BBC India correspondent who worked alongside Tully in the 1990s, recalled that when he joined the BBC in Delhi in the mid-1990s, Tully lived in a two-floor residence in south Delhi. The ground floor was his flat; the floor above was the BBC office. “Quite often Mark would say at the end of the day: ‘Why don’t you pop down for a beer.’ He enjoyed having a circle of people for a chat and gossip. He was one of the most convivial people I have met. And I remember his favourite tipple was Rosy Pelican, a beer from Haryana – tho, sadly, long out of production.”
Tully had joined the BBC in the 1960s, and was posted in India in 1