Mark Tully

Born in Calcutta, educated in England, Mark Tully joined the BBC in 1964 and in 1972 became the Chief of the Bureau in Delhi, where he still lives and works. Among the many major stories he has covered are the Bangladeshi war, Mrs Gandhi's State of Emergency, the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and Operation Blue Star when the Indian army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. This operation and the Punjab problem were the subjects of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, which he wrote with his colleague Satish Jacob. In 1987 he made the much applauded radio series, From Raj to Rajiv, which traced the story of India’s first forty years of independence. His second book accompanied this series."