By Asia Samachar | India |
Mark Tully, the distinguished broadcaster and journalist widely regarded as the BBC’s “voice of India”, has died at the age of 90.
For decades, Mark’s calm, resonant delivery and deep understanding of the subcontinent made him one of the corporation’s most respected foreign correspondents. He reported on defining moments in South Asian history, including wars, political upheavals, famine, riots, the Bhopal gas disaster and the Indian army’s 1984 assault on the Sikh Golden Temple.
Mark and Satish Jacob authored Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, a tightly reported account of Amritsar and Operation Blue Star. Drawing on first-hand reporting and official records, the book examines Indira Gandhi’s final confrontation with Sikh militancy and its lasting political and moral consequences.
One of the most perilous episodes of his career came in 1992 in Ayodhya, when he witnessed a mob of Hindu extremists demolish the Babri Masjid, reported the BBC. Amid chants of “Death to Mark Tully”, he was held for hours before being rescued by local officials. The destruction of the mosque, he later said, marked the gravest setback to Indian secularism since independence in 1947.
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Born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, in 1935, Mark was a child of the British Raj. Though educated in England, he returned to India in 1965 as a BBC administrative assistant and soon emerged as a reporter of rare insight. Fluent in Hindi—an uncommon skill among foreign correspondents—he earned widespread respect and affection, becoming known simply as “Tully sahib”.
Mark was expelled from India during the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, but returned 18 months later and went on to serve more than two decades as the BBC’s Delhi bureau chief, overseeing coverage across South Asia.
Knighted in 2002 and honoured by India with the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, Mark spent most of his life in Delhi, describing himself as belonging to both India and Britain.
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