Accentuating the positive

There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world’s population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its social, political, personal and religious upheavals, but his career with the BBC ended in 1994 after a doomed attempt to point out to John Birt, in a public forum, the error of his broadcasting ways.

There have been many journeys in Mark Tully’s life, the first from India, where he was born in 1936, going ‘home’ at ten to a dark, chilly England which he didn’t much like after India’s warmth and colour. He returned in 1964, as the BBC’s India correspondent and later Bureau chief. There were interior journeys too – he flirted briefly with the priesthood, did a television series and a book on The Lives of Jesus, and in No Full Stops in India he controversially defended traditional Indian values at a time when he felt they were threatened by the modern world.

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India in Slow Motion, co-written with Gillian Wright, is an account of his latest journey, trying to get answers to the question ‘What holds India back?’. The short answer is, predictably, corruption and endemic inefficiency, but Tully is after something more: a way forward. It is a very Indian excursion; meandering and intensely personal, frustrating, emotional and frequently despair-inducing, but lit up by those moments of sweetness, of hope, of humour and potent charm that anyone who knows India will recognise.

The phrase that constantly recurs is ‘bad governance’. The country, which he sees as still shackled by a colonial bureaucracy and mind-set, has become a byword for red tape and corruption – ‘a kleptocracy’ as a distinguished Indian civil servant has called it.