Mark Tully: 'It's always a question of balance'

As the Western media falls over itself to tell the miraculous story of the Indian economy – the phenomenal software companies of Bangalore, the film and media businesses of Mumbai, the clamour for cars and foreign travel among the country's growing middle-classes – at least one significant voice is calling for calm.

Sir Mark Tully, who has devoted most of his working life to deciphering the cultural minutiae of the second most populous country on earth, feels that his fellow journalists are in danger of misrepresenting modern India by exaggerating its progress.

There is a great irony in this. During his tenure of more than 22 years as the BBC's India correspondent, Calcutta-born Tully was sometimes derided for his attempts to highlight local success stories as an antidote to the widely held view that the nation was a basket case.

"There used to be people who would say Mark Tully has gone native because I think they misunderstood my attempt to present a balanced picture. When I first went to India the picture was of a country riddled with poverty, a hopeless place which was described as 'living from ship to mouth' because it was so dependent on food aid. I always struggled to try to portray the other sides of India without denying there was poverty," he says.

"Now there is a reverse situation where people are being simplistic about the progress India has made; glibly talking about India as the great economic power of the future, without realising and remembering that there are enormous problems India has to address, and without discussing the way that India should develop economically."

When Tully talks, the word "balance" is never far from his lips and is at the heart of the title of his latest book: India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change. His views on the Indian economic revolution mention "balance" in every sentence. "I firmly believe that the way the West has developed economically is unbalanced and that if India develops in this way, it is going to be very dangerous for it. Growth in the West is driven by consumerism, which is unbalanced and unhealthy, because it inspires greed. We all need to consume things, but that must be kept in balance. It is also unbalanced because of what we are doing to nature, the amount of energy we consume."

That's all very well for Tully to say, he was born into a wealthy family, educated at Marlborough and read history and theology at Cambridge. What do Indians make of his words of caution, now that greater riches appear to be in their sights? "Some Indians say 'You are trying to stop India becoming like other countries and stop us enjoying the kind of things the West enjoys,'" he admits. "But one of the things I admire and love about India is that it's a hugely open society. I'm a foreigner after all, and yet I can go around India and say these things about where I think India is going wrong and I'm listened to with respect and interest, though by no means always with agreement."

Mark Tully, 71, does still command great respect. The security teams and cavalcade of vehicles parked outside Asia House in London as he arrives for this interview are for the Mongolian president, his excellency Nambaryn Enkhbayar, but staff are just as excited about seeing Tully.

He sits in a whitewashed upstairs room, his tweeds giving him the appearance of the English gent that he is, though their origins, the Khan market in south Delhi, say a lot about the wearer. A decade after leaving the BBC, he still lives in the same Delhi apartment, with his partner Gillian Wright.

As a news journalist he invariably managed to achieve balance, though that did not mean he was not accused of bias. He was unpopular with Pakistan president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but then also fell foul of his successor General Zia-ul-Haq. When Bhutto was hanged by his rival's regime, Tully was critical. Muslim extremists toured the streets shouting "Death to Mark Tully" and supporters of Bhutto, his erstwhile critic, "tried to put me on their shoulders, which would have been extraordinarily embarrassing for me, had it been filmed".

In his new book he has returned to the thorny subject of his departure from the BBC, which followed a very public falling-out with John Birt over the then new director-general's plans to reform the corporation. Why rake it up?

"That's a very good question. I decided to do it for several reasons and one of them was because the book is about balance," he says, using that word again.

In Tully's view, Birt's sweeping campaign of reforms epitomised a wider failing in understanding that good business practice is often a healthy mix of the old and the new. "Everything has to be new, change, change all the time. One of my criticisms of John Birt when he came into the BBC was that he completely rubbished the organisation in his desire to give the impression that everything needed to change. He described the BBC's journalism, which was trusted around the world, in totally derogatory terms. All because he wanted to give the impression that there needed to be total change."

Birt accused Tully, who attacked the DG in a public speech in Birmingham, of being an old soldier firing his musket. "I had said in my speech I realised we had to change and change is part of life. In my view, the way people did things in the past has value too. I believe very strongly that there should be in our lives, both as individuals and as nations, a respect for tradition and a creative tension between the old and the new."

In Mark Thompson's era as director-general, Tully is back in the fold, presenting Something Understood on Radio 4, having previously presented a BBC television series The Lives of Jesus.

He complains of a loss of "respect for the religious tradition" in modern Britain. Though he is an Anglican and says he was "brought up as an absolutist", Indian life has taught him to take nothing for granted – his first memory of midnight mass in India is of a church filled with turbaned Sikhs and Hindus with daubed foreheads. "From this I started to extrapolate the obvious fact that one of the great truths in India is never taking anything too far and never saying you are too certain about anything."

From his Delhi apartment he watches the Indian media revolution unfold. The surge in Indian language newspaper production and domestic television services has reduced the impact of the BBC, though Tully acknowledges that the corporation has increased its presence in India and continues to be "held in considerable respect, more I believe than any other foreign broadcaster".

Like the wider economy, Tully believes the Indian media must be careful to preserve its values in the rush to embrace change. One Indian journalist colleague commented to him that "there are two areas of Indian life where more money is being spent and the product is getting worse: the media and cricket."

He is often asked to talk to young Indian media workers, who sometimes tell him that radio, the medium for which he is best known in India, is dead. "I say to them that that's a very un-Indian thing to say and that in India we realise that nothing ever dies finally. One of the greatest forms of communication in India is still the bush telegraph. I always point out that the printing press didn't kill off this form of communication, radio didn't kill off the print media, television didn't kill off radio and the internet isn't going to kill off anyone. This is the balanced way and I think the Indian way to look at it."

'India's Unending Journey' by Mark Tully is published by Rider Books, price £14.99