Mark Tully
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Briefly
Avijit.Ghosh, January 26, 2026: The Times of India
Former BBC correspondent Mark Tully’s upright reports got him deported from India during the Emergency, and he nearly got lynched during the Babri Masjid demolition, and he remains the only foreign journalist whose name evokes recognition across the country.
As BBC’s chief of bureau for 22 years, Tully reported on topics as diverse as Indo-Pak conflicts and sati, Operation Blue Star and caste, Maoists and dead tigers. Affable in tone and earnest in demeanour, he broadcast the stories as he saw them. He spoke to locals, listened to them attentively — it certainly helped that he was a rare foreign correspondent who spoke fluent Hindi. Tully understood that he wasn’t the story, just the medium to narrate it, without fear or favour. Tully was knighted in 2002 and received Padma Bhushan in 2005. Under him, BBC became a credible name in India. And Tully its trusted voice. It’s often said Rajiv Gandhi believed the news of his mother (then PM) Indira Gandhi’s assassination only after listening to the BBC report.
TV series, books, keen interest in Hinduism marked Tully’s later yrs
He also travelled to different parts of South Asia filing reports on the execution of Bhutto, the creation of Bangladesh and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “His reports were always unbiased, which is why he was also disliked by the governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh,” says former BBC correspondent and associate Qurban Ali.
Ali was with Tully when Babri Masjid was demolished on Dec 6, 1992 in Ayodhya. “In the afternoon, one of the armed karsevaks said, ‘Yeh BBC ka Mark Tully hai. Isko maar daalo. (He is BBC’s Mark Tully. Kill him.” Along with a third journalist from a Hindi newspaper, they were locked up in a neighbouring temple. “Those three hours were terrifying. Eventually a mahant (priest) and a local journalist rescued us,” says Ali, who retired in 2024.
Born in 1935 to a wellheeled business family in Calcutta, Tully’s early interaction with India was restricted by a stern European nanny. “I was taught how not to become an Indian,” he once said in an interview. He received early education at New School, Darjeeling, before being packed off to England when 10. There he received public school educa tion, studied at Cambridge and drank copiously at pubs. “On his 21st birthday he put 21 shillings on a pub par to buy 21 pints, all of which he duly downed,” says a 2001 BBC article.
Surprisingly, he also trained as a priest for two terms before finding a fresh vocation with BBC. He moved to Delhi in 1965 working as “an administrative assistant” before earning his spurs as a reporter in the 1971 war.
He also reported extensively on Punjab in the 1980s. In his book, “Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle”, Tully vividly details Operation Blue Star and maps the reasons behind the rise of extremism. “He was not only courageous, but also had a passion for news. Tully knew exactly where it was and always tried to find out why it was happening,” says Jacob, who had co-authored the book.
In his book, “Non-Stop India”, Tully said he understood the difference between writing dispatches for listeners in Britain and for Indian audiences, especially the Hindi service. “I remember my editor tearing me off a strip for reporting a long list of Indira Gandhi’s opponents arrested on the night when, in 1975, she declared a state of Emergency. “We haven’t heard any of these people,” he said angrily. “No, but listeners in India certainly have,” I replied, “and that dispatch was intended for them,” Tully wrote.
In the 1990s, when the BBC seemingly went corporate, he confronted and challenged the higher-ups which led to his resignation in 1994. “He had deeply imbibed the original BBC ethos of reporting without fear or malice. For me, and for many others, he was like a training school,” says Ali. In his later life, Tully presented tv series, wrote books and displayed a keen interest in Hinduism. He received the knighthood in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005. In a condolence message posted on X, PM Narendra Modi described Tully as “a towering voice of journalism” whose “connect with India and the people of our nation was reflected in his works.” Tully had settled in the capital’s leafy Nizamuddin West where he lived with his partner, renowned translator Gillian Wright.
