Opinion Pratap Bhanu Meha writes: The gift to India that was Mark Tully

It used to be joked that all Indians have a “Sir Mark memory.” My own dates back to high school, during the Delhi riots of 1984. In towns like Jaipur, there was no real source of reliable news. Horrible snippets trickled in about the targeting of Sikhs in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, but little else. It was only Sir Mark’s voice, each evening, speaking with controlled despair, that provided any coherent picture of what was unfolding. There was something about the soft, rhythmic lilt of his delivery that paradoxically made the horror he described even more vivid. In those dark evenings, he was becoming the only voice of Indian history as it happened.

Apart from Mark’s personal qualities, it is important to recall the institutional and political context that made him indispensable. The foreign press has always had an outsized importance in India, largely because our own press has been censored or constrained. The BBC, in effect, had to perform the role of a local radio station, since India had none. But the BBC was also, then, a genuinely great institution. It had its biases and blind spots, but if it commanded authority, it was because of journalists like Mark. One could occasionally disagree with a particular judgment, but remarkably, he never lost trust.

In 2004, Mark recorded a radio interview with me on secularism. Two things from that encounter have stayed with me. A young intern assisting him was asking starry-eyed questions about journalism while we waited. At one point, Mark said: There is only one rule in journalism. Ask yourself, why should anyone trust you over the long run? If you keep that question in mind, it automatically disciplines how you report. Trust, once corroded, could never be regained. And it could be corroded as much by the allure of popularity and money as by proximity to power. In later years, Mark became a vocal critic of the BBC’s decline, accusing it of an odd combination of Stalinism in editorial decision-making and crass commercialism.

The second thing that stood out was his sociological prescience, born of hard-won reporting. He had an uncanny sense that India’s cultural politics were on the cusp of transformation. This was not because India could not be secular. Indeed, we both agreed that the term often misled more than it illuminated, but because he sensed a deep cultural stirring for authenticity that India’s elites were ignoring. This was a theme he returned to repeatedly, most memorably in No Full Stops in India.

Mark had the distinction of being targeted by every political dispensation. He was expelled from India during the Emergency. His account with Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s last battle, has of course been superseded in parts, but it remains an indispensable starting point because it courageously asked two questions that were long evaded: About the machinations within intra-Sikh politics, and about the Congress party’s complicity in creating the tragedy of Operation Blue Star and its aftermath. During the violence surrounding Ayodhya, he was chased by a mob shouting “Death to Mark Tully,” merely for the act of reporting.

Mark was singular in that he never succumbed to the temptations that ensnare so many journalists. He understood India and its challenges deeply, yet there is never a trace of misanthropy in his criticism. He never became a crusader for a favoured cause, and he never confused neutrality with objectivity.

Mark often said that he felt a sense of fate about his connection to India. He possessed a remarkable sense of gratitude, a feeling of the giftedness of life. He was deeply Anglican, yet I recall him once saying that Christianity could do with less emphasis on original sin and more on a sense of “fate.” For him, fate was not passive acceptance. It was the recognition that, despite all its problems, the world is a gift. India, and the task of reporting on India, was a gift he embraced like no other.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express