Mark Tully’s 5 Defining Moments Covering India: From Emergency to Babri

A titan of journalism known as the BBC’s “Voice of India”, Mark Tully passed away on January 25 in Delhi at the age of 90, after spending over five decades reporting from the country.

During the Emergency (1975–77), Tully’s BBC dispatches in Hindi and Urdu openly criticised press censorship, and he was reportedly asked to leave India for refusing to comply with restrictions. Recalling those days in a 2007 interview with ThePrint, Tully said, “Yes, during the Emergency. I was given 24 hours to leave because we wouldn’t sign the censorship.”

In 1984, amid Operation Blue Star, when foreign journalists were restricted from Amritsar, Tully continued covering the crisis by coordinating reporting from Delhi.

As noted by Coomi Kapoor in The Indian Express, it was the BBC that scooped the news of Indira Gandhi’s assassination hours before official government sources disclosed the event. Tully gave full credit to his longtime assistant Satish Jacob for breaking the story, but he rushed down from Mussoorie to follow up on the coverage.

One of his most defining moments came on December 6, 1992, during the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Later, writing for the BBC, he recalled: “As I watched the last cordon collapse and the police walk away with their wicker shields held above their heads… I realised I was witnessing a historic event.”