Nonstop India by Mark Tully; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.499; 257 pp Sir Mark Tully is perhaps the most well-known and distinguished ‘foreigner’ living in India. Born in Calcutta, he has made India his home and speaks fluent Hindi. For 22 years he was the BBC’s chief of bureau in New Delhi. Tully was knighted in 2002 and three years later awarded the Padma Bhushan. Although broadly sympathetic to India, Tully has not been uncritical of the Central and state governments as and when he felt it necessary. In 1975, he was scathing in his criticism of prime minister Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of the Emergency and was thrown out of India, together with the BBC. Later after he returned, he quarrelled on a matter of principle with his employer the BBC itself, and resigned the job he clearly loved. Though essentially a brilliant broadcaster, Tully has also written several books on India, based partly on his extensive TV and radio coverage for the BBC. His last oeuvre No Full Stops in India was published two decades ago when India had just embarked on its programme of economic liberalisation. Nonstop India is a sort of sequel. Its 257 pages paint a multi-hued canvas of a nation that is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting. But in the final analysis, Tully is clearly with the optimists. “My belief remains that there are dangers ahead, but if the right measures are taken to avert them, the title Nonstop India will be justified,” he writes in the preface. The book begins with a subject that has been grabbing headlines in recent times: the Naxalite or Maoist insurgency, which prime minister Manmohan Singh described in 2006 as “the single biggest internal security challenge faced by the country”. Tully uses Harivansh, a remarkable journalist whom he has long known, to narrate the Maoist saga in Jharkhand through his eyes and experience. Harivansh gave up mainstream journalism in Mumbai and Calcutta to return to Jharkhand to become editor of Prabhat Khabar, a newspaper on its last legs. He transformed it into the largest selling daily of the state, mainly on the strength of it becoming the most credible and trusted voice of the neglected tribal people, while raising social awareness of their sorry condition. In the process, he exposed the widespread corruption of the Central and state governments and their pitiless exploitation of tribals. In Singrauli in central India, Tully found tribals displaced from their land to facilitate the construction of a power station. “They were housed in tin shacks, cheek by jowl, standing in straight lines, with no shade, no horticulture in fact. When the resettled tribals complained to officials accompanying me that they had no electricity, they were told rudely,‘You can’t afford electricity, so you cannot have it.’ They had lost their land and livelihood to provide the rest of India with a basic facility they were never going to enjoy,” he writes. Nonstop India is littered with such instances of cruel exploitation and corrupt governance. The critical factor which…
