From Mark Tully, BBC’s most credible voice, to Prime-Time noise: How journalism changed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* 

The death of Mark Tully, former head of the BBC in India, marks the end of a kind of journalism that was deeply rooted in factual, on-the-ground reporting. I never met Mark Tully, but I followed his work closely from my growing-up years. We eagerly waited to listen to his dispatches from Delhi on the BBC. While the BBC’s Hindi service was extremely popular in rural India and many of us grew up listening to it, I also began tuning in to the BBC’s main services from London, which carried reports from correspondents across the world.

For me, the first major turning point in Mark Tully’s journalism was his reporting during Operation Bluestar in June 1984, when he filed reports from Chandigarh and Amritsar. While Akashvani and Doordarshan were broadcasting only the official government version, it was Mark Tully and Satish Jacob who were bringing out stories excluded from the “official media.” Even newspapers at the time largely followed defence ministry handouts and directives from the Ministry of Home Affairs. Listening to Tully’s dispatches was always illuminating.

BBC Radio became one of the most credible voices in India during those years, and the BBC’s standing was inseparable from journalists like Mark Tully and Satish Jacob. While Mark Tully, as a white British journalist, received greater recognition and visibility, I have always felt that Satish Jacob often broke more complex and compelling stories. After Operation Bluestar, Sikh sentiments were deeply wounded, and several Sikh personnel in the armed forces faced disciplinary action for alleged acts of revolt. The official media merely repeated that “the situation is tense but under control.”

Then came one of the darkest moments in independent India’s history. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own security guards at her official residence on October 31, 1984, around 8 a.m. Much of the country’s top leadership was not in Delhi that day. President Giani Zail Singh was abroad, as were several senior leaders. From the time the news broke until around 6 p.m., there was chaos on the streets, yet All India Radio and Doordarshan maintained near-total silence. They only announced that the Prime Minister had been shot and was being treated at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Both state broadcasters refused to report anything further without official guidelines. It was the BBC that first reported that Indira Gandhi had died and that she was killed by her Sikh security guards. Mark Tully’s reporting, marked by accuracy and restraint, provided firsthand information that state media deliberately withheld.

The BBC remained a credible institution in those years because of journalists like Mark Tully who reported directly from the ground. Whether it was the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya or other major developments in India and South Asia, the BBC kept audiences informed. Sadly, today the BBC has lost much of that credibility, even though it continues to command a large Indian audience.

The post-1990s period saw a mushrooming of television channels in India and a gradual decline of radio, although radio has seen a partial revival through music- and cinema-based programmes. What we still lack are serious radio broadcasts. The opening up of private television channels in the name of “media freedom,” coupled with the vilification of state media, gave rise to what is often called “dalal media,” which in many ways surpassed even the propaganda of the Emergency era. Today, this media can safely be described as mainstream media that protects the business and caste interests of the Brahmin–Bania elite.

Amid countless prime-time debates today, I still miss the era of calm, factual dispatches from journalists like Mark Tully and Satish Jacob reporting from Delhi. Contemporary reporters and journalists have much to learn from Mark Tully, who remained quintessentially a radio journalist. Will today’s propaganda-driven media ever ask its reporters to follow the Mark Tully school of journalism—reporting all sides of a story and, most importantly, amplifying the voices of ordinary people rather than serving as instruments of the ruling party’s propaganda?

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*Human rights defender