As Shri L K Advani’s rath rolled from shimmering Hyderabad in the morning to austere Adilabad at night, and from the bleak villages of Vidarbha region in neighbouring Maharashtra the next morning to newly-prospered Nagpur at night, I wondered how best to describe the contrast between the two Indias.

In a perceptive article on Naxal violence in The Asian Age recently, M. J. Akbar penned a picturesque imagery, calling it the divide between ‘‘Neon-lit India’’ and ‘‘Star-lit Bharat’’. My former journalistic colleague P. Sainath, the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and author of the widely acclaimed book Everyone Loves A Good Drought (about rampant corruption in drought-relief schemes), employed an even more ideologically charged description in his must-read reports about farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha. ‘‘Not a paisa of the government’s Rs. 1,075 crore ‘relief package’ has been disbursed so far. But how do those in Mumbai care that the suicides have crossed 300, when the Sensex has crossed 10,000?’’ (That was in February. Just two months later, the Sensex has crossed 12,000, making India’s metropolitan elite even more indifferent to the grim reality in much of rural Bharat.)

Advaniji would use just two simple, straightforward and yet highly evocative words— hatya and atmahatya —to weave his theme of ‘‘Bharat Suraksha’’ around the twin problems faced by the people here.

Thus, Advaniji’s Bharat Suraksha Yatra was travelling in that part of India which is facing two acute threats. First is the threat to our country’s internal security from increasingly audacious Naxalite groups. Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has recently described Naxalism as ‘‘the biggest threat to India’s internal security’’. Second is the threat to our kisans’ economic security from what many experts consider to be ‘‘the gravest crisis in Indian agriculture since Independence’’.

In Andhra Pradesh alone, since 1990 nearly 2,000 innocent citizens have lost their lives in Naxal violence, the highest in any Indian state. Most of the killings have taken place in Telangana. A majority of the victims are poor OBCs, STs and SCs. So much for Naxalites’ concern for the downtrodden. The state also accounts for the highest number of cases of farmers’ suicides—around 4,000—in the past decade or so. Most of these have taken place in Telangana.

Naturally, in all his speeches (about 10-15 a day) in the Telangana region of Andhra and the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, Advaniji would use just two simple, straightforward and yet highly evocative words— hatya and atmahatya —to weave his theme of ‘‘Bharat Suraksha’’ around the twin problems faced by the people here. The message clicked with the villagers, who stopped his rath frequently along the way, insisting that he accept their garlands and address them. Despite the forbidding heat, the crowds were sizeable and cheering.

Most of them knew nothing about a Joint Parliamentary Committee, but whenever Advaniji mentioned that he would demand a JPC to investigate the phenomenon of farmers’ suicides and suggest remedial measures, there was strong clapping. Probably, the very hint that Parliament, after all, is not altogether indifferent to an issue of vital importance to kisans made them feel that the idea deserved to be applauded.

He would also speak about other threats to Bharat Suraksha—terrorism, massive infiltration from Bangladesh, Congress and communist parties’ politics of minorityism, corruption, and lack of good governance. His support for the demand of statehood for Telangana no doubt drew loud applause in the region. But even this demand, I felt, seemed to have gained greater justification and urgency in the minds of the people because of their belief that they would be better equipped to overcome the twin problems of Naxal violence and kisans’ distress, if their region was carved out into a separate state.

A participant in the yatra throughout its 35-day, 6,000-km and 10-state stretch, I am writing this column from a Toyota Qualis in a long convoy that will soon end its journey in Maharashtra and enter Chhattisgarh. With that, we’ll leave behind us one of the two problems—that of kisans’ atmahatya. For there have been no cases of farmers’ suicides in Chhattisgarh so far. But we’ll be spending the next two days in a state where the other problem— hatya by Naxalites — has lately become more vicious.

The Salva Judum programme, a government-assisted anti-Naxal mass campaign which has seen a rare grassroots cooperation between the BJP and the Congress, has become a special target of murderous attacks by the Left-wing extremists. The Union Home Ministry had advised the former Union home minister to abandon his rath and travel in a bullet-proof vehicle. Advaniji politely rejected this plea during his journey in the Naxal-infested areas of Telangana and Vidarbha. He has decided to do the same in Chhattisgarh too. A leader cannot be expected to go on a mass-contact campaign sitting inside a bullet-proof car.

But looking back at the journey so far, I am numbed by the thought that so many kisans are ending their own lives at a time when India’s super-rich are amassing several thousand additional crores to their wealth, when the mindspace of the elite and even the middle-classes is sought to be grabbed by the latest idiocy on the fashion circuit, and when the UPA rulers in New Delhi seem to have become a victim of the same delusion about the ‘‘feel good factor’’ that cost the NDA dearly in May 2004. Neon-lit India’s petty self-obsessions look surreal when you come face to face with the dreary realities of kisans’ and tribals’ India.

Consider the contrast between the two, and the extent of it. As the yatra left Gujarat to enter Thane district in Maharashtra, I read reports of fresh deaths of Adivasi children due to malnutrition. And this in hamlets that are barely a hundred kilometres away from the country’s commercial capital. According to some estimates, malnutrition has claimed over 5,000 tribal children in a state that until recently prided itself for being India’s most advanced. When the yatra headed from Pune towards Solapur—home territory of the Union agriculture minister—one heard of suicides by onion farmers and grape farmers in the region. (Onion prices have collapsed from Rs. 24 a kilo to just one rupee a kilo. Similarly, in Vidarbha, cotton prices have plummeted from Rs. 2,800 a quintal two-three years ago to about half of that now.)

If infant mortality rate is one of the universally recognised parameters to measure a country’s Human Development Index, post-liberalisation India seems to have added a unique new parameter to proclaim its own unbalanced development—namely, Kisans’ Suicide Mortality Rate’. The phrase has been coined by Sainath, who wrote in The Hindu: ‘‘While until a few years ago, suicides were confined to the cotton-growing areas of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, the tragic phenomenon has now spread to paddy and soya belts of Punjab and Maharashtra and groundnut growers in Kerala.’’ For this to happen, something truly and fundamentally must be ailing Indian agriculture.

Before the yatra began, many a pundit in New Delhi asked me: ‘‘Why is Advaniji taking out a yatra now? Where is any issue before the nation for him to go on a journey around the country — that too in the middle of summer?’’ The best way to reply to them is by recalling the profound words of Mahatma Gandhi, himself a great yatri in the pre-1947 era: ‘‘Politics of the chattering classes pollutes. Politics of the masses purifies.’’