Mark Tully

Sir Mark Tully was a British journalist who worked for the BBC for thirty years and headed its New Delhi bureau for twenty. He was born in Calcutta on 24 October 1935. According to Wikipedia's account he joined the BBC in 1964 and moved to India in 1965, though The Tribune says he was first posted there as an administrative assistant; The Tribune adds that he was expelled from India at 24 hours' notice after the Emergency was declared in 1975 and came back eighteen months later. He resigned from the BBC in July 1994 after a dispute with its director-general, John Birt, and then worked in New Delhi as an independent journalist.

For this record he matters for one book. Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle (1985), written with his BBC colleague Satish Jacob, deals with the events that led up to Operation Blue Star. Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles cites it for the run-up to the army action of June 1984 (vol. III, notes to chapter 1, citing pp. 142 to 166 of the book).

Key moments

• 1964 and 1965: joins the BBC and is posted to India (Wikipedia and The Tribune).
• June 1984 and after: his BBC work took in Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi that October, according to Wikipedia's account, and The Tribune's obituary lists Operation Bluestar among the events he reported.
• 1985: Amritsar is published; a revised edition followed in 1986 (Wikipedia).
• Appendix 17 of Gurmit Singh's volume III (p. 129) prints an Amnesty International report on the Sikh detainees held at Jodhpur after the army action. It cites the book on the pilgrims caught in the Golden Temple complex: a young woman staying in the Guru Ram Das Serai told Tully and Jacob that she heard no army appeal to surrender, and Amnesty quotes the authors as writing that many innocent people were killed, many injured and many wrongfully arrested.
• July 1994: resigns from the BBC.
• 25 January 2026: dies in New Delhi, aged 90 (The Wire and The Tribune report the death; Wikipedia gives the date).

Gurmit Singh also draws on the book for a claim about the founding of Dal Khalsa. Citing p. 60 of the book, Gurmit Singh writes that Giani Zail Singh paid the Rs 600 hotel bill for the meeting at the Aroma Hotel, Chandigarh, at which Dal Khalsa was formed on 13 April 1978, and then telephoned journalists to ask for front-page coverage of it (vol. II, p. 45). This page relies on Gurmit Singh's account of what the book says; see the analysis.

What he is remembered for. The Wire calls him the BBC's "voice of India". In this record he is the outside reporter whose book a Sikh historian cites for the weeks before Operation Blue Star, and whose account of what pilgrims inside the complex told him Amnesty International cited.