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Improving quality of governance biggest challenge for India: Mark Tully

Interview with former BBC correspondent

Improving quality of governance biggest challenge for India: Mark Tully

Aditi Phadnis
As Independent India turns 70, former BBC correspondent in India Mark Tully talks about its past, present and future with Aditi Phadnis

You were born in Calcutta, you went to school in Darjeeling, then you went off on a brief holiday to the UK and then came back again, to the place where you belong....

It was a bit more complicated than that. I was born into a family in India. My mother's side and my father's side had both been in India for many years. They were very much British in India right from the time of 1857 - we have a diary of my great grandmother and what happened to her as a young girl in 1857.
 

My mother was born in what today is Bangladesh; my father was first generation in India. He was one of those old managing agents in a company called Gillanders Arbuthnot. He had six children, all born in Calcutta. The first three went to school in Darjeeling up until 1945. And then we all went back to England. So from the age of about nine, I was in England and I went to British public school, did my national service and went to university. And after some messing around and doing a job - a nice job, actually - in an NGO housing old people, I managed to join the BBC. After a year at the BBC I came to India in 1965 and I've been here, except for one spell when I was posted back to London in 1969-70; and then from 1975 to 1977 for 18 months when I was expelled during the Emergency. And after that I have been here ever since.

So I have seen India for nearly all of the 70 years, except for about 20!

So in 1965, you must have arrived smack-bang in the middle of the India-Pakistan war?

I came just after the war. I remember Lal Bahadur Shastri's funeral.

What do you remember about that?

I remember huge crowds and I remember feeling very shocked to see the police whacking the crowds with their lathis… which you can still see today!

... And then there was the anointing of Indira Gandhi....

Yes, I was fundamentally an administrator in my first incarnation but then I managed to start taking up journalism as well. I remember the shenanigans of Indira Gandhi's appointment and the Syndicate. I remember seeing it after she had won (the party election to become Shastri's successor) and how uncertain she seemed to be. I remember, particularly, the press conference that was held at the Press Club of India. Frank Moraes was chairman of the Press Club. There was Indira Gandhi, who had just taken over - and the press were being so aggressive! They were quite rude to her and she didn't seem to have any answer to them. And Moraes just sat there. Occasionally, he would intervene, but he really couldn't control the situation. And I got the strong impression of a very insecure person. The devaluation of the rupee had just taken place and there were many articles criticising her for it. And of course (there was) the trouble over the election of the President of India….

Is there a similarity between Indira Gandhi then, Sonia Gandhi later and Rahul Gandhi now?

No, I don't think so, because I don't think Sonia, in my view, has ever shown any sign of insecurity. It seems to me that if you look at Sonia Gandhi, when Rajiv (Gandhi) died she took a very firm stand; she didn't waver - she stayed outside. And later, when she felt she had to join (politics), she did join. I don't think she has wavered as a leader. It was she who took the decision not to be prime minister. No one else told her not to be prime minister. She has the look of a determined person: when you see her walking, when she is talking to people, she seems to be firm.

Indira Gandhi really looked like a pushover - but Sonia Gandhi looks like a person who knows her own mind.

And Rahul also, despite all the criticism, doesn't seem to be an insecure person -although I don't know him at all.

You have interacted with much of the Opposition. What is the Opposition in India?

Well, I was very, very sad because of the collapse of the Janata (Party) experiment. I had thought and hoped that India would have something like a two-party system. I knew many of the Janata leaders personally. I made a film about Morarji Desai. I came to know him well. I was very fond of him. I knew Choudhary Charan Singh as well, Chandra Shekhar - many of them.

Vishwanath Pratap Singh's brother, Sant Bux Singh, was a particularly good friend of mine. Devi Lal had a wonderful way of speaking. He once told me: 'Tully sa'ab, aaiye, sabse bara jalsa hoga Rohtak mein. Aapke liye helicopter bhej dunga (Come for my meeting in Rohtak; it will be the biggest ever. I'll send a helicopter for you). I used to say, "Choudhary sa'ab, I am very fond of you, but I am not on your side, I am not allowed to be on your side".

I was enormously sad when the Janata group broke apart. I think it was a great opportunity for India, which was missed. So I've always had a soft spot for the Opposition - the Janata school of the Opposition.

I have always been a Socialist. When I was at public school, I think 14 of us voted Socialist in a mock election we had in the early 1950s ahead of Britain's general election. So I wish the Socialist Janata movement had held together.

In those days, the Jan Sangh/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was a different animal from what it is today....

Yes, a very different animal. It was, of course, a much, much smaller party and seemed to be much more confined to its agenda. I knew (L K) Advani in those days and I have great admiration for (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee and Advani. Of course, personally - and this is only personally - I would much rather see Advani in the Janata group. But I have admired the way Vajpayee and Advani - mainly Advani, to be honest - have built the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into the party it is today. I hope the BJP continues to treat Advani with respect.

Let's talk about the time you were expelled -because those two years were kind of a defining moment for India….

(Laughs) yes. What happened was that there was a lot of negotiation about foreign correspondents and censorship with a man who had been appointed by V C Shukla (then information minister) - he was a former police officer (I forget his name). Eventually, we were told that we had to sign an agreement and that agreement would limit what we said, how much we would file. The BBC headquarters and various other newspapers thought these terms were wholly unreasonable and would actually oblige us just to tell lies - like reporting only what the prime minister and the government were saying and blacking out what the Opposition was saying.

So, I - and several other foreign correspondents - just refused to sign that agreement. Then I got a call from Sheel Haksar, who was the joint secretary (external publicity). He very politely and regretfully told me: "you have to leave the country in 24 hours". So, that night I was on an aeroplane back to London.

You reported extensively on another era during which India came close to another division: the Punjab crisis. Some would argue that India was divided then and continues to be divided. Who was wrong? Who was right?

I made it clear in the book I wrote, along with my colleague Satish Jacob, that the Congress made a big mistake in promoting (Jarnail Singh) Bhindranwale. The Congress allowed Bhindranwale to get out of control. The central government should have taken action against Bhindranwale before he moved into the Akal Takht and fortified it. I think the central government made a mistake; they started on the wrong foot because although they were from the Congress - which meant they were the secular party - they appointed Bhindranwale because they thought he would be a Sikh religious person, who would stand against the Akali Dal, the main Sikh religious party.

And once chaos started to grip Punjab, action should have been taken then and there. When deputy inspector general of police A S Atwal - a serving officer of the police - was shot on the steps of the Golden Temple, and you do nothing… So I think the blame lay largely with the government. Of course, Bhindranwale was to blame as well. And so was the Akali Dal.

Are you seeing some faint echo of that in the whole gau rakshak (cow protector) controversy now?

No, I don't see a similarity there. I think the gau rakshak controversy is basically the result of the difficulty you have in controlling movements like that. Hooligan elements get into it, people take advantage of it and excite religious passions. The fact is the RSS does not, cannot say it controls gau rakshaks. And if you encourage that sort of thing or you build up that passion, that's what you get.

The answer to it is exemplary and widely publicised punishment for the people who do it. Basically, most of these people are cowards. And if they really think they're going to get imprisoned for what they are doing and stay there a long time, they would think more than twice about doing it.

Are they also people who don't know their country?

Well, there's a Hindi word "lafanga"… In a country - in any country - where young people who want to make a success of their lives fail, they take out their frustration in these kinds of ways.

We have a western neighbour struggling with a similar problem but on a much larger scale than India's. There was a massive attack earlier this week on a hospital. You've been in India and in Pakistan. What is the difference between the two countries. Everyone harps on how we are not different at all, we're the same people, the same culture… What are your thoughts as both countries prepare to enter their 70s?

I haven't been to Pakistan for some time. But I've always thought there are profound differences. One: India is a stable democracy; Pakistan is a state dominated by the Army. Whatever the nature of the democratic government in power there, the Army is behind the government. Pakistan is a theocratic state; India is not - and I hope it never will be. That's another difference.

And if you look at Pakistan - whether in the east or the west - backward is not the right word: it is less governed, less modernised. It was on the fringes of India rather than in the mainstream of India. So the impact and the institutions that developed in mainstream India were not firmly entrenched in parts of Pakistan. If you look at West Pakistan - Balochistan, North West Frontier Province, etc -they were very thinly governed by the British. And Bangladesh was basically a sort of garden for Calcutta: the agricultural produce - jute, in particular - came from there. But all the industrialisation took place in Calcutta.

So India is entering its 70th year. What do you perceive is its biggest challenge in the next 70 years?

I do believe that one of the biggest challenges for India is to improve the quality of its governance. The institutions of this country must be revived, reformed and given the autonomy they require to protect them from political interference. And a real effort must be made to revive the esprit de corps for institutions because that is all part of the autonomy. If a collector, for example, is asked to sign some document that he knows is false, then by virtue of esprit de corps, he can go to his superior and make sure he is protected from the consequences of not signing it. I have been told by several IAS officers that if you go to the chief secretary and tell him you are under pressure, most likely he will shrug his shoulders. And many IAS officers refuse to sign these documents. Many of them get transferred. So esprit de corps is very important.

Second, I think it is really important to treasure the secular culture of this country. By this I don't mean the secularism of the Congress, for example. I mean allowing every religion to flourish in the country and doing one's utmost to give everyone the freedom to live their lives the way they want to live them. We are there, we are ahead of everyone else -look around you, there are women wearing the burqa, the hijab… but we must not endanger this by insisting on Hindu majoritarianism. And then India will be a shining example to the rest of the world.

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First Published: Aug 13 2016 | 9:44 PM IST

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