Killing The Phoenix

By Kajol Singh

Before elections, relief camps in Kandhamal close, creating the largest population of displaced Christians in India.

It's baffling how terrifying a simple colour can be. Fluttering tiredly in the balmy wind all over Kandhamal, little flags of saffron have become menacing blotches of impeding danger. It is a call for submission, an announcement of the end of freedom, a mockery of faith. Today, relief camps that housed the victims of the August 2008 anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal are closing one by one. And 22,000 Christians have nowhere to go except back to their charred homes. Welcoming them to their villages is a monochromatic condition. Embrace the saffron, or else.

As we enter Betticola village, a gangly young man in a red striped shirt and sunglasses stops us. His first words: “If you enter, there will be maar-peet (violence).” He rolls up his sleeves in a quick motion. Several questions follow, and then an introduction, “Saroj Pradhan, village youth.” Saroj boasts of having worked in Delhi, and having met BJP’s Rajnath Singh and shaken LK Advani’s hand. Two years ago, he came back to his village and got involved in organising local political gatherings. Today, Saroj doesn’t have a job, but he has eight cases to his name for destroying property, intimidation, murder and communal rioting. It was in his village that a Christian priest, Father Lameshwar Kohon was killed, his neck slashed and large stones dropped on his head.

Saroj’s adult life is a timeline of violence. When riots broke out in Kandhamal on December 24, 2007, churches and Christian missionary schools were looted and razed to the ground. “These foreign people were asking good Hindus to pray to a god who’s not even Indian,” says Saroj, “They needed to be taught a lesson.” Vishwa Hindu Parishad vice president Lakshmanananda Saraswati was murdered on August 23, 2008 at his kanyashram (girls school) at Tumudibandh, about 100 km from Phulbani, the district headquarters of Kandhamal district. Kandhamal exploded the next day, after his body was paraded through 200 km of the main roads. A Maoist group claimed the murder; the state government corroborated this. “These Christians killed our Swamiji,” says Saroj, pointing at the pictures of the firebrand Swami pasted on every door in the village. “The fires and house-burning was started by some 300 outsiders who came into our village. Anger was boiling inside me too, so I only joined them,” he justifies. His friends, also gangly unemployed youth, say there is no place in their village for “cow killers and murderers”. They must convert to Hinduism. “Everyone in India is a Hindu. Sometimes, they need to be reminded,” says Saroj.

Janas Malik too was a resident of Betticola, but now stays with his wife and 4- year-old daughter in the empty stalls of a weekly market. Since the G Udaigiri camp was closed two months ago, Janas moved here along with 50 other families. “We did try to go to our village, but a bunch of Hindu rowdies hung my child on top of a well and blackmailed me. I had to follow 19 rules if I wanted to return,” says Janas. No wearing pants, saying Jai Shri Ram, a ban on using the village well for water and the forest for livelihood, and finally, conversion to Hinduism by drinking a bottle of cow dung water. Janas did it all, but when he was bullied to prove his faith by burning the bike of a fellow Christian, he ran back. “We’re not animals to be treated like this!” says Janas. “I don’t want to be a Hindu. They shaved my head and made me say Jai Shri Ram at knifepoint, but the whole time, I was thinking of Jesus Christ.”

This was a common scene all over Kandhamal eight months ago. The carnage continued for 40 days, killing 38 people and displacing more than 22,000. However, time has neither healed, nor reformed. The weapons are still around, and so is the fear. As Orissa gears up for both Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections on April 16 and 23, scared refugees are being asked to go back to their villages. Adding to the insecurity — 783 cases against rioters, none convicted. “We need to close the camps some day,” says Kandhamal District Collector Krishan Kumar. “How long can they live in segregation?” Four thousand people have reportedly been identified as possible troublemakers and have been warned. Kumar says there will be heavy deployment of paramilitary forces and voters will be transported by the government to the booth and back. However, the Christian community appealed for a postponement of elections in Kandhamal, but when the Election Commission did not budge, they decided to stay put in the remaining five camps or in makeshift tents. Between holding on to dear life and exercising their franchise, it is an obvious choice.

Electioneering in the district is expectedly centred on the riots and the souring relationship between the erstwhile ruling alliance of the BJD and BJP after their split on March 9, 2008. The BJP blames the BJD for the lack of progress on the Lakshmananda murder case, and calls the BJD’s secular claims opportunistic hogwash. But far worse than any political mudslinging is the odious communal rhetoric. The BJP Assembly candidate for G Udaigiri constituency of Kandhamal is Manoj Pradhan, presently in non-bailable police custody for seven cases of communal rioting. Ashok Sahu, the BJP candidate for the Lok Sabha polls, conducts a mahayagya in all the villages he visits, calling on the Kondh tribals to observe rituals they have never performed before. After the death of Swami Lakshmananda, Sahu was the first to hold the Christians responsible and call for revenge. “People say I’m making Kandhamal a laboratory for experiments, like Narendra Modi did in Gujarat. Well, I’m proud of it,” says Sahu in a BJP rally, to much applause and ululating by the adivasis brought there in trucks from their villages. “I wish a tsunami on the Christians and the missionaries,” says Sahu to HNN.

Bhubaneswar-based human rights activist Dhirendra Panda says this hate propaganda is meant to create a votebank in a district where 52.7 percent of the population is adivasi. “The yagyas are a blatant imposition of a sort of brahminical version of Hinduism on adivasis whose actual traditions are more animist,” he says. The Sangh Parivar calls the forced Hindu conversions ghar-vaapsi, or reconversion, based on the assumption that the adivasis are originally Hindu.

But are the adivasis so impressionable, so easy to manipulate? Not really. The success of the Hindu whitewash in Kandhamal is thanks to a crafty reworking of an existing caste conflict. Kandhas (after whom Kandhamal is named) form 89 percent of the adivasi population in the district, and are scheduled tribes. The other hill tribe here is Panos, who for close to 200 years, served the Kandhas as farm labourers. Considered an oppressed community, the Panos were classified as Scheduled Castes or dalits. It is this community that has seen the maximum number of people convert to Christianity. Unfortunately, due to an anomaly in the definition of SC in the Constitutional (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, SCs who convert to Christianity are no longer eligible for job and education reservations. The Panos have long demanded ST status as hill tribes, but due to desperate need for livelihood, they stopped declaring conversions to Christianity, and reportedly also forged ST certificates. This left the Kandhas, legally STs, seething at having to share their state benefits. Ever since Swami Lakshmananda took charge of the Sangh Parivar’s Kandhamal programme in 1969, the Kandha-Panos conflict became an easy palette to saffronise. In the riots in 2007 and 2008, it was the Kandha tribals that were mobilised to wreak havoc on the Panos Christians.

Even those Christians who have now moved back home from the camps with government compensation of Rs 10,000, 40 kg of rice, sugar, etc. live in constant fear. The relief camps have CRPF guards, the villages don’t. Twenty five families have returned to Pirigada village, and live in tarpaulin tents while trying to rebuild their burnt houses. Across the road are the Hindu houses. “When tractors bring bricks for us to reconstruct our houses, the Hindus block the way,” says 27-yearold Pranay Naik. “Any day now, we expect them to sneak in and kill our children.”

ALSO IN Pirigada are 14 men who underwent the humiliating process of the Lakshmananda brand of conversion to Hinduism. One of them, Siprian Digal still has his red dhoti and a Hanuman-Shiva locket. “They were 700 people. We were 40. The only way to stay alive was to convert,” says Siprian. After sending his wife and daughter to Kerala, he lived in his half-broken house on the Hindu side of the village for three months, unable to draw water from the village well, bathing in the darkness of the night, praying to Mother Mary in private, and Bajrang Bali in public. “One day, I couldn’t take it any more. I went to church, and then moved across the road, where I could be myself,” says Siprian. Christians in Pirigada village realised that the upcoming election will decide how safe they will be. “Congress is the only party at the moment in Kandhamal without blood on their hands,” says Pranay. “The RSS, VHP and BJP were killing us,” says Daud Naik, who lost his brother in the riots. “And because the BJP was an ally, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and his party BJD kept quiet. I also realise that the Congress cannot get a majority in Orissa. And I don’t know, will my life change with a change of government? I might as well kill myself instead of spending sleepless nights waiting for a Yuva Vahini thug to stick a knife in my chest.”

As the Orissa administration promises smooth polling in a ‘normal’ Kandhamal, the lead up to the election is already converting the hill terrain into a communal battleground. Different gods are being invoked by different parties, but it is only the demon of paralysing fear that Kandhamal is left with.

Hindutva: Projections and Reality!

By Ram Puniyani

RSS is an organization where succession of the top post, Sarsanghchalak, takes place by nomination by the outgoing Chief. Recently K.Sudarshan, outgoing one, nominated Mohan Bhagwat as the new Chief (March 2009). On taking over Bhagwat pronounced that Hindutva is emancipatory concept.

The last time the word Hindutva created the confusion was in the case of corrupt electoral practices by Manohar Joshi, who said that if Shiv Sena BJP comes to power they will turn Maharashtra into first Hindu state in the country. He had used the word Hindutva for his politics. The matter went up to the court, and due to the confusions around the word Hindutva, court ruled that Hindutva is a way of life! This came in handy for RSS combine to wriggle out and to assertively use the word in their political campaigns. Now we hear that Hindutva is an emancipatory concept!

What is emancipation? In Indian context emancipation stands for the process which leads to equality of dalits and women. It also stands for the dignified status of Adivasis and workers. Many of these processes started during the freedom movement as an accompaniment of the struggle against British rule. While we were witnessing these processes steered by the likes of Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar and Gandhi, the country also saw the politics by Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha and RSS. This latter trio based their concept of politics around religious nationalism. For Muslim League it was Islamic Sate, Pakistan and for Hindu Mahasabha, RSS it was Hindu nation.

Muslim League derived its ideology from the name of Islam and Hindu Mahsabha and RSS developed the term Hindutva, as the guiding ideology for Hindu nation. There is lot of parallel between the pattern of ideology of Muslim League and Hindu Mahsabha, RSS. They all kept aloof from the freedom movement and the associated processes of social transformation of caste and gender.

Freedom movement was not only for freedom from the British rule it also symbolized the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the values which are emancipatory for those oppressed by feudal rule of Rajas and Nawabs, and the associated clergy (Mullahs, Pastors and Brahmins). Talking of Hindutva in particular, the term was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his book ‘Who is a Hindu?’ in 1923. Hinduism is not a prophet based religion. Originally word Hindu began as a geographical category, for all those living on east of river Indus. Later all the religious traditions, from caste and gender hierarchy based Brahmanism to egalitarian streams like Nath, Tantra, Siddha and Bhakti all came to be covered under the umbrella of Hinduism. Brahmanism is the dominant tendency within this spectrum, and currently all things Brahminic are identified as Hinduism. Dr. Ambedkar pointed out that Hinduism is Brahminic theology.

Savarkar defined Hindu as one who regards this land from Sindhu to Seas as Fatherland and Holy-land. In this definition all are included barring Muslims and Christians. Savarkar further went on to coin and define the word Hindutva. Hindutva, for him is total Hindu ness, a combination of Aryan race, Culture and values. In essence it came to mean a politics based on Brahminic values of birth based inequality of caste and gender. It gives the status of slaves to dalits and women.

RSS picked up the concept of Hindutva from there. Hindu Mahasabha and RSS both stood for status quo in caste and gender relations. RSS politics did exhibit these values in practical form, over a period of time. Contrary to emancipation, RSS ideology wants not only status quo ante of feudal times, further it wants to push back whatever little process of transformation of Dalits and women has taken place over a period of time.

Beginning with gender, RSS is an exclusively male organization. Its women wing is subordinate to it, it is Rashtra Sevika Samiti. Here, Swayamsevak for men, Sevika for women. The word swayam, self, is missing in women’s organization. Lets be clear, according to all male dominated patriarchal organizations, Taliban , Fascists, Christian fundamentalists or RSS, women’s self is in the pocket of men. Women are subordinate, are property of men. So they are to be dictated, controlled. So one of RSS trained swayamsevak, Pramod Mutalik forms Shriram Sene and beats up women. They dictate that women should be doing or wearing, this that and the other.

As far dalits are concerned Dr. Ambedkar goes on to assert that dalits need to learn, organize and struggle for their rights, for equality. RSS has come up with Samajik Samrasta Manch, to co-opt the dalits at subordinate position within the present social structure where dalits remain subjugated in the social system. RSS also has the ideology of integral humanism. This essential part of Hindutva politics argues that as the human body has different organs doing their different functions, similarly our society has different groups doing their job. A change in their roles will create disequilibrium, which will be detrimental to the smooth functioning of society.

One does concede that the language of RSS is very subtle and clever, but its actions regularly show what it means. RSS is the Father of all other organizations working for Hindu nation. The politics it has unleashed through BJP, VHP, and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram etc. does regularly show the real intent of RSS. Few samplers- BJP Vice-president Rajmata Scindia endorsing Sati tradition, VHP-leadership endorsing the killings of dalits in response to the killings of dalits in the aftermath of Gohana, on the issue of cow-slaughter. RSS repeatedly emphasizes the ‘ancient glory’ of the times when Manusmriti was the rule.

One is happy to know that the new RSS chief knows the word emancipation. So far so good, as he can’t go beyond parroting this word, as the meaning of the word is totally against the agenda of RSS. RSS agenda is opposed to emancipation and stands for suppressing the low caste, and women in perpetual subjugation.

The Phantom Of A New Anarchy

By M H Ahssan

Baitullah Mehsud has a strategy and an arsenal of suicide bombers. HNN tracks the man who is being billed as more dangerous than Osama

He's often described as a guerilla fighter par excellence. His arsenal is lethal, for like most war lords, it consists not just of disciplined Kalashnikovwielding cadres but motivated suicide bombers, willing to swiftly turn their bodies into human missiles. He is known more for his ‘profession’ — jehad — and less for what he did as he was growing up in the tough terrain of Waziristan in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). His brand of jehad has catapulted him to power and infamy and Baitullah Mehsud — a household name beyond the borders of Pakistan — is being called the new Osama.

Barely in his mid-30s, Mehsud’s meteoric rise — embellished with attack after deadly attack at alarming regularity – has been internationally acknowledged. He found his way in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential leaders and revolutionaries. Newsweek magazine has described him as being “more dangerous than Osama bin Laden’’ and only late last month, the US Department of State announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the location, arrest, and/or conviction of Baitullah Mehsud, the senior leader of Tehreek-e- Taliban (Taliban Movement of Pakistan).

A press release issued by the US Bureau of Public Affairs says, “Mehsud is regarded as a key al Qaeda facilitator in the tribal areas of South Waziristan in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities believe that the January 2007 suicide attack against the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was staged by militants loyal to Mehsud. Press reports also have linked Mehsud to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the deaths of other innocent civilians. In addition, Mehsud has stated his intention to attack the United States. He has conducted cross-border attacks against US forces in Afghanistan, and poses a clear threat to American persons and interests in the region.”

Five million dollars is no small amount and Mehsud is no small man. Often described as ‘Pakistan’s Osama’, Mehsud’s reward money is the exact same as was announced for the al Qaeda chief who has been on the run since 9/11, 2001. Matchboxes being sold in NWFP’s capital city of Peshawar carry a picture of Osama, the world’s most wanted fugitive, with text in Urdu announcing that the US government promises to pay up to five million dollars for information leading to Osama’s whereabouts.

So who is Mehsud and why is he being likened to the man who displayed the power of changing New York’s skyline, when pilots allegedly trained by him reduced the stately Twin Towers to rubble? Personal details about Mehsud are still very sketchy. The little that is known is that he was briefly a gym instructor, that he is diabetic and that he shuns publicity — probably the reason why only one photograph is in circulation. Lots, however, is documented about his militant activities. Inspired by the one-eyed Mullah Omar (also on the run since 9/11), Mehsud, in fact, started his career in jehad after the US’ global war against terror when President George Bush called his counterpart, President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and infamously said — you are either with us or against us.

Musharraf was quick in reversing his policy vis-à-vis Afghanistan and the Taliban and while he took a sharp U-turn — fighting the very Taliban that Pakistan had helped train — he lost popularity and support amongst his own people, as was evidenced in the elections last year. The vote was clearly more a referendum against Musharraf and his pro-US stance, a sentiment that overtook the sympathy factor for Benazir Bhutto, assassinated only months before the February 2008 election. Mehsud, in fact, earned his spurs at this precise time when the hatred for America took deep root in Waziristan, an agency in Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The tribal areas are the geo-strategic gateway to Afghanistan, and South Waziristan, from where Mehsud hails, has been an important supply route for the militants since the 1980s, when they crossed over to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Mehsud’s support base can be explained through the fact that the Mehsud tribe comprises up to 70 percent of the population in South and North Waziristan.

Tribe loyalty is a strong factor that has propelled the new Osama, but Baitullah Mehsud’s brand of jehad has several other ingredients that have been slowly but steadily brewed to fatal perfection. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the Taliban’, when asked about Mehsud said, “He was a non-entity till 9/11 but now appears to be a world-class commando with tribal warlike abilities. He is a Pashtun and revenge is core to the Pashtun honour code. He is fighting the US forces in Afghanistan on the basis of revenge motivation. Pashtuns don’t take kindly to invaders.”

Not known to have had any formal education, Mehsud, according to Pakistani journalists, has only studied in a madarsa, where he was inspired by the Taliban ideology. The Taliban’s interpretation of Islam is one of the ingredients in that fatal brew and Mehsud, in his interviews — he only speaks Pashto — has often said, “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Quran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the World.”

But all Talibs are steeped in similar interpretations and if Mehsud has risen from the ranks to now demand attention in the minds of Barack Obama’s key aides, it is because he has also displayed political and strategic skills (see accompanying piece by Prem Shankar Jha.) Apart from being a local who was brought up in the rocky terrain which he knows backwards, he, as Lt Gen (Retd) Talat Masood, a Pakistan-based strategic analyst put it, “has leadership qualities. The American presence has triggered a strong nationalistic impulse and Mehsud has become the popular face of resistance. The real problem is that the drone attacks have had a serious psychological fallout amongst Pakistanis.”

Baitullah Mehsud has crafted this sentiment to his advantage and is now the one man who is not just spearheading the fight against the US and the NATO allies but has emerged as the single-most serious threat to Pakistan itself. The man, who has often boasted and made dramatic declarations like — if the US has air power, we have fidayeen (suicide bombers) — has only last week declared his new intent: Pakistan will witness two attacks every week. That he has a committed cadre and enough fidayeen has been displayed time and again. The recent dramatic early morning attack on the police academy in Lahore that left 20 dead and close to a 100 injured forced Pakistan’s Interior Advisor, Rehman Malik to make a startling revelation on national television, saying, Mehsud is recruiting suicide bombers and paying them Rs 5 to 15 lakh each.

The man who started his jehad journey by trying to enforce Shariah and then quickly moved on to dispatch men from Waziristan into Afghanistan to take on the US-led coalition and their global war against the al Qaeda, now heads the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan . If, in South Asia, the hyphen has shifted from India-Pakistan to Afghanistan-Pakistan, it is something Mehsud and his estimated 18,000-strong army can take credit for. Ironically, the Pakistani Taliban was formally set up only in December 2007, barely a year and a half ago.

But even before the Tehreek-e- Taliban was born, Baitullah was the chief negotiator and signatory to many peace pacts that the Army nudged the provincial NWFP government to sign. In February 2005, for instance, Baitullah signed a deal with the federal government. Wanted for providing home and hearth to al Qaeda operatives in Waziristan, Mehsud signed a pact with the government pledging that he would neither shelter the al Qaeda nor launch operations against the Pakistani army. His role as chief negotiator immediately propelled him as the leader in the troublesome tribal belt. As Hamid Gul puts it, “Mehsud gained in stature, for the tribals started seeing him as somebody who was an entity at par with the government.”

But like in Swat, where the Asif Ali Zardari dispensation has just signed a tenuous peace pact which is already showing signs of falling apart, Baitullah’s promise was soon broken by him. In fact, his peace pacts have always been tactical pauses, used to consolidate his own well-oiled jehadi machine.

Baitullah’s rise is intrinsically linked to Musharraf’s open support of the US. If the storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was the tipping point wherein Musharraf stood isolated amongst his own people, it was also the point when Baituallah shifted some of his focus away from Afghanistan and trained his guns squarely in the direction of the Pakistani state. Lal Masjid was stormed in June 2007 and within two months, Baitullah, in brazen defiance, had 250 Pakistani soldiers as his hostages in South Waziristan. In what was easily his most humiliating moment, President Pervez Musharraf found himself negotiating a release strategy that ended on Baitullah’s terms. Musharraf was forced to release as many as 25 militants in exchange for his own troops. The 25 who walked out of state captivity were, according to Musharraf’s own admission, trained suicide bombers. Baitullah’s appointment as the chief of the Pakistani Taliban in December 2007, at a consultative council, was by then a mere formality. Baitullah used the gathering to reiterate his agenda: throw out coalition forces from Afghanistan. One eye trained on Pakistan, he also demanded the release of all prisoners including the Lal Masjid maulvi. Crucially, he also demanded that the Army withdraw its troops from Swat Valley, once better known as Pakistan’s Switzerland.

As the formal head of Tehreeke- Taliban, Baitullah is not just a worry for Pakistan as it slowly descends into anarchy. He can also be described as the biggest international migraine, to borrow former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright’s words. A United Nations report released in 2007 blamed Mehsud for almost 80 percent of suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Stories of how he orders death by stoning or death by flogging, of how music, television and photography are banned and how he gives a 24-hour-notice to government informers by sending them a needle and thread so they can make arrangements for their kafan are legendary; but pale in comparison to how lethal a global jehadi he has honed and chiselled himself into.

The most alarming thing for Pakistan itself is the bare fact that there is a lot of sympathy for him within the Pakistani Army. Gul ascribes this to the fact that Pashtuns are the second largest ethnic grouping, but this also translates not just into support for the Pakistani Taliban but into reluctance on the part of the forces to fight their own people. After the failed peace accord of 2005, Mehsud and his 17000-strong brigade succeeded in virtually pushing the Army out of South Waziristan. Says Ahmed Rashid, wellknown author of a book on the Taliban and a strategic expert, “Retired ISI officers are helping the Pakistani Taliban and they have become more Lashkar than the Lashkar.’’ Even the current ISI chief has, in informal briefings with journalists, described Mehsud as a “patriotic Pakistani”.

That Mehsud’s Taliban is a potent fighting force that threatens Pakistan is evident. What adds to its fire power is the fact that the civilian government — the Zardari-led PPP government is now a year old — is not up to the task of tackling terror. “Several governments have engaged Mehsud in talks but it has not worked, and the State has to assert itself but the problem is that we have very poor leadership,’’ says Talat Masood, adding, “Military rule incapacitated institutions and now the jehadis are incapacitating the State. International policy makers are not being very helpful either by leaning too heavily on Pakistan for the global war against terror.”

THE US’S war, which is now on top of Obama’s agenda, is clearly fanning the extremist fire in Pakistan. Says former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in an exclusive interview to HNN, “The drone attacks must stop immediately”. If there is consensus in Pakistan, it is on the issue of how Pakistan’s support to the US is now leading to the country itself imploding. “Pakistan has never appeared so vulnerable,’’ says Masood, and many will concur. In fighting America’s war, Pakistan finds itself at war with itself. Hamid Gul’s recipe for cure sounds simple. “We have to change our pro-US policies,’’ he says, and that definitely is Pakistan’s mood. It was that mood that threw Musharraf out of power. The more crucial question is — can Zardari or any civilian Prime Minister, or dictator for that matter, even survive such a drastic policy change?

The State cannot implement the policy even though it knows what it is. The prevarication, or the plain unwillingness, or perhaps the inability of going against the world’s superpower is what keeps Baitullah Mehsud in business. He is not short on determination. Or indoctrination. Or suicide bombers.

Why too much cash is not good for you?

By M H Ahssan

The best thing to own during a recession is cash. With everything going crash-bang-thud, hard cash gives you a sense of security, especially when inflation is not denting its value.

But here's the paradox: the only thing worse than not having cash is having too much of it. If cash is at a premium today, it's because we have had too much of it in the recent past. All assets - stocks, real estate, gold - rose in value over 2003-08 because Alan Greenspan, former chief of the US Federal Reserve, made cash dirt cheap after the dotcom bust, and George Bush ran a loose fiscal policy driven by too many tax breaks for the rich. Our own government wasted its tax bonanza in subsidising petro-goods and throwing money at the poor.

Companies raised cheap loans and equity - and blew it up on overambitious projects and overseas acquisitions. Today, you can see the Tatas, Birlas and Wockhardts struggling to pay off their loans. Ordinary people bought houses and sedans they could not afford, and are now being tossed out of their homes and asked to hand over their car keys as they default on EMIs.

The broader point is simple: when you have too much of cash, you seldom do the right thing. You become complacent, and finally lose it. Let's flash back to Bajaj Auto. It was India's No 1 two-wheeler company around the mid-1980s, when Hero Honda was just entering the market. Bajaj had huge cash reserves, and an unassailable position in scooters. It pooh-poohed Hero Honda's attempt to open up the mobike market. The management assumed that if ever Hero Honda became a real threat, it could always use its cash to squash it.

For 15 years, it kept hoping that the market trend would reverse. It didn't. It was only when Hero Honda came very close to pulling off an upset victory that Bajaj started putting big money into building exciting mobikes. That's how the Pulsar became a big hit. But once again, a huge cash hoard blurred its market vision. Even as it was finding traction in mobikes and closing in on Hero Honda, it forgot all about making scooters exciting. Honda came in with advanced, easy-to-ride scooters and clobbered Bajaj in its den.

The explanation for the cash paradox is counterintuitive: far from providing security, it makes you think you have time on your side. It reduces your risk-taking ability. And when you do finally decide to take the plunge, it may already be too late.

Whether you are a company, an individual or a government, too much money is not a good thing. Ask Bill Gates, who has the stuff in sackfuls. When asked by Forbes magazine a decade ago what he would do with his billions, he said his kids won't get too much. "One thing is for sure. I won't leave a lot of money to my heirs, because I don't think it would be good for them." Warren Buffett is giving the bulk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not his kids.

We should be worrying about the Infosyses of the world. Infosys is oozing so much cash even in this recession that it may be taking few risks. At last count in December, 2008, it had nearly Rs 10,000 crore in liquid assets such as bank deposits and mutual funds. Satyam, too, had excess cash. It proved to be an open invitation to the promoters to rob it.

In Infosys' case, the management has been using its cash to build hotels and restaurants for its staff (it is the country's biggest hotelier, with over 15,000 rooms built with its own money). The logic, of course, is that normal hotel rooms were costly till about a year ago, and it made sense to build your own rooms. This kind of integration into non-related businesses usually leads to disaster.

Let's also see why Infosys is making big money. Its USP is cost, quality arbitrage and scale. Offshoring enables it to use cheap Indian labour. The quality arbitrage comes from using high-value engineers for cheap coding. It's a bit like using airline pilots to drive autorickshaws. It makes engineers costly for the engineering industry, where they are needed more.

The scale advantage is purely linear: expanding the Infosys topline means expanding the manpower, with attendant problems of managing a huge workforce. At over 100,000 employees, Infosys is fast approaching the limits to linear growth. It needs to rework its business model where a rupee in topline does not add proportionate costs in manpower. Moreover, Infosys is highly export-dependent. We know what the recession has done to all export economies in East Asia. What will it do to Indian infotech? Infosys needs to sell more at home.

Against these future threats to growth, is Infosys taking enough risks now to give itself real options? Why is so much money idling in fixed deposits? Should Infosys be focusing on its main business or running hotels? It is today where Bajaj Auto was in 2000 --- too much cash in the bank, too little paranoia about current or future competition. I shudder to think where it will be five to 10 years down the line if it does not change now.

Where has all the election fun gone?

By M H Ahssan

Elections in India are, of course, deadly serious, big-money businesses because we like to think they determine the political and economic destiny of a billion-plus people.

But in equal measure they are -- or, at any rate, used to be -- colourful carnivals, high on high-decibel campaigns, slogans, drumbeats, sparkling oratory, idiosyncratic humour and all the endearing little oddities that reflect life and other social transactions in India.

Politicians would come around asking for our votes every few years, trying every trick in the book (and a few that aren't in any book!), and for those few weeks of campaign time, we were treated to an engrossing reality show, the likes of which no television scriptwriter could conceptualise.

Perhaps it's a reflection of a 'maturing' of our democracy or of how serious the game has become that the two principal political parties are campaigning this time on slogans that are mind-numbingly boring. Or that the most 'memorable' election speech this time was by a foul-mouthed, upstart politician.

It wasn't always like this: in some previous elections, even when politicians resorted to name-calling, they did it with a light touch that, even when it wasn't always politically correct, was more mirthful than malicious. There was, of course, more than a fair bit of outright hate-mongering afoot, but there was enough buffoonery as well to compensate for all that serious stuff.

My own favourite over-the-top bizarre campaign story is from the 1991 elections, when -- I kid you not -- chicken biryani figured pivotally as a campaign theme. Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was Rajiv Gandhi's buddy from their Doon School days, was contesting on the Congress(I) ticket fromMayiladuthurai in Thanjavur district in Tamil Nadu. As a Brahmin (by birth, even if not, as he claimed, "by conviction") contesting in the Dravidian heartland, he was up against it, particularly because his principal, DMK rival's campaign was sustained by venomous anti-Brahmin rhetoric.

For a while, Aiyar tried to keep it clean by talking of developmental issues and promising unrealistically to make Mayiladuthurai "the Dubai of India". But when he realised that his rival's anti-Brahmin platform was gaining traction, he decided to take it head-on by projecting himself as a meat-eating Brahmin, in the belief that it would render him more acceptable to a carnivorous constituency of Dravidians.

Aiyar even challenged his rival to a contest in the village square to see who could eat more chicken biryani. His campaign's masala recipe was well received, and Aiyar became perhaps the first politician to win by making a fondness for the pleasures of the flesh a campaign theme!

This year's election has also been low on sparkling oratory of the sort that AB Vajpayee and VP Singh used to enliven campaigns with. LK Advani has in the past confessed that Vajpayee's rhetorical flourishes gave him a complex and left him tongue-tied, which perhaps explains why the BJP has been compelled to dig out Vajpayee's old speeches on the stump this time. VP Singh was something of an oddity: put him in a room with mediapersons, and he would get pretty monosyllabic, but barely minutes later, on an al fresco dais, in front of 50,000 people, he would wax lyrical. It's perhaps a sign of the times and of today's leaders that parties -- from the Congress to the CPM to the BJP -- are imparting speech training lessons to their leaders.

Perhaps there's just too much riding on elections these days for parties and candidates to not be seen to be taking them seriously, which probably explains all this prepping of candidates and parsing of policy details. For voters too, every election reflects, the triumph of hope over experience: we vote in the expectation that somehow this time it will be different, and we want to be taken seriously as voters. But it would be nice to spice up our election campaigns every once in a while -- perhaps with some chicken biryani masala...

The world's most important election in India

By M H Ahssan

Relatively little rested economically on the result of last November's US presidential election. John McCain was politically well towards the big-government wing of the Republican party, while successful Democrat Barack Obama, after an initial burst of public spending, will be forced by economic reality to retrench during his remaining years in office.

There is, however, an election pending that will have a far more important economic effect on the fate of mankind, causing a fifth of the world's population to remain mired in poverty or to move rapidly towards economic growth and prosperity. That election is in India.

The British colonial oppressors did a fairly decent job in India, but they got one thing horribly wrong: their exit. Apart from causing a civil war with 500,000 casualties, they essentially handed the country on a plate to the leftist Congress Party, run by economic illiterates (not that British economic policy between Neville Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher was that much better). As a result, India suffered for the next four decades in an economic backwater with around 1% per capita economic growth and an endless proliferation of bureaucracy, the "permit raj".

There was a gradual easing of controls in the 1980s and a somewhat more vigorous one after 1991 under prime minister Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Manmohan Singh, but Indian economic growth thereafter appeared to relapse back into its usual torpor until the advent in 1998 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Vajpayee government pursued market-opening policies with considerably more vigor than any of its predecessors, with the result that by 2004 Indian growth was running around 8% annually and the country had been included among Goldman Sachs' BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group of emerging markets that would in future dominate the planet.

In an exhibition of voter ingratitude unequalled since the British electorate threw out Winston Churchill in 1945, the Indian electorate in 2004 rejected Vajpayee and the BJP so strongly that a Congress-dominated coalition was formed under Manmohan Singh. There was much talk of further economic reform, but in reality reform essentially ceased, although economic growth didn't.

However, like all Congress governments the Manmohan administration proved to be addicted to public spending and fiscal indiscipline, with the spending outcome for the 2008-09 fiscal year being fully 20% above the budget estimate for that year. Since most Indian states also run budget deficits, the overall Indian fiscal deficit has widened in the global downturn to around 12% of gross domestic product.

The Economist poll of forecasters predicts Indian growth of 5% in 2009 and 6.4% in 2010, but if the fiscal deficit persists at these levels, that growth will almost certainly be curtailed by financing difficulties. Indian inflation in the 12 months to February ran at 9.6%, while three-month interest rates are currently at 4.5%.

In spite of India's magnificent export successes in last decade, the current account deficit is already running at 3.7% of gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, under present policies, the Indian economy is an accident waiting to happen, with an inflationary crisis and seizure of financial markets the most likely form for the breakdown - the rupee is already down 20% against the US dollar in the past year and could easily collapse if things go wrong enough.

Nevertheless, the potential of the Indian economy remains enormous, if only the country can find a proper government. The announcement last week of Tata Motors' new US$2,000 Nano automobile demonstrates why. The combination of a vast supply of extremely cheap labor and a domestic market that can provide manufacturers a large enough domestic market for their products for economies of scale to be achieved is rare.

Outside of India and China, emerging market automobile producers have the enormous problem of an inadequate domestic market, so are forced to rely on export markets, in which it is very difficult to achieve enough volume quickly. Malaysia's Proton automobile company had most of the advantages of Tata, but without an adequate domestic market it was never able to expand enough to make itself truly internationally competitive.

However, the Tata saga also demonstrates India's problems. Tata had originally intended to launch the Nano last October, manufacturing it at Singur, in the state of West Bengal. It had obtained permission from the Communist government of West Bengal and had spent $350 million on the plant. Nevertheless, in early October, it was forced by local protests led by West Bengal's opposition party, the Congress offshoot Trinamool Congress, to abandon the plant and transfer production to a new factory in Gujarat, which will not be ready until 2010.

Meanwhile, Tata is being forced to manufacture Nanos at its plant in Pantnagar, a facility that will only allow annual production of 50,000 Nanos, compared with the 250,000 that Tata believed it could sell in its first year - and with 51,000 advance orders in the first 10 days from the product's official launch, Tata's estimate of the Nano's sales potential may even have been low. (See Nanomania sweeps India, Asia Times Online, April 15, 2009).

The stakes in the Indian election are thus high. At one extreme of possible results, India can continue its progress as an emerging market with Chinese-style growth rates and a population that is expected to exceed China's by 2025. Such an India would be a highly important strategic balance to China, and a magnificent ally for the United States and Europe, balancing China and Russia's authoritarian leanings. Most important, over the next generation, it would lift a fifth of the world's population out of poverty.

At the other extreme, India can suffer a financial crisis that ends the current spurt of growth, followed by a reversion to the "Hindu rate of growth", leaving the country mired in poverty, a problem rather than a solution to the world's geopoliticians, with conflict with nuclear-armed Pakistan an ever-present possibility and its myriad inhabitants everlastingly impoverished.

The Indian election takes place in five phases between April 16 and May 13. The chance of the optimal outcome must be reckoned as slender. Vajpayee has retired from politics (he is 85) and the new BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani (himself 81) is not particularly economically oriented and has a history of Hindu extremism that may prove highly off-putting to Moslem voters and somewhat off-putting to moderates. Nevertheless, the reformist former finance minister (2002-04) Jaswant Singh is still active in the party, leading the opposition in the upper house of parliament and in this election standing for election in Darjeeling, West Bengal (at 71, he is a stripling by Indian political standards.)

The economic failings of the Manmohan government have not yet become fully apparent. India is in the "stimulus" phase of excessive public spending when it creates spurious economic growth but has not yet run up against the financial constraints nor made fully apparent its disadvantage in accelerating inflation and "crowding out" private investment. Thus, a BJP absolute majority or a position so close to a majority that it could easily govern with the adherence only of like-minded free-market parties in the National Democratic Alliance is not very likely.

The most likely outcome is a renewal of the Congress-dominated coalition, which is currently leading in opinion polls but without an absolute majority. Manmohan would presumably continue as nominal prime minister, although at 76 and in recovery from a January 2009 heart surgery, he may become increasingly a figurehead, deferring to Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, 38, the natural next leader of the dynastically dominated Congress. (Rahul is the son, grandson and great grandson of Congress Party Indian prime ministers).

Since Congress is likely to expand only modestly from its current 150 seats (out of 545), even if Manmohan wished to return to his 1990s reformism, he would be unable to do so because the coalition would include communists or other anti-market elements. Rahul is Western-educated and has worked for the Monitor strategic consultancy, but his family tradition of state control make him an unlikely reformist, although in spite of his youth he would probably be more able to control the left of a Congress coalition than Manmohan.

Given the weakness of Congress and BJP, it may well be that neither Advani nor Manmohan will be able to form a government, with regional parties holding the majority of seats in parliament. A group of those parties, mostly left-oriented, have formed a "Third Front", which would most likely ally with Congress, although its leader Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, might be an alternative prime ministerial candidate.

Mayawati has held no non-political jobs other than schoolteacher; it is thus interesting that in 2007-08, she was the highest taxpayer among Indian politicians, paying 260 million rupee (US$5.2 million) in tax.

It's a pretty grim prospect. The chances are that after the dust clears in mid-May, India will elect another anti-market government, or possibly submerge itself for a couple of years in political squabbling. In either case, its stellar growth record is likely to come to an unpleasant end.

Given the abdication of Russia also from serious pretensions as a growth market, the BRIC group of emerging growth markets will in that event have narrowed itself to BC. With the United States, Europe and Japan also mired in low growth and excessive budget deficits, the 2010s are likely to be a miserable global decade.

Nanomania sweeps India

By M H Ahssan

The rush of luxury-car owners seeking to buy the Nano, the world's cheapest car, was not the only surprise hours after advance bookings for the latest product from Tata Motors opened across India on April 9.

At the Concorde Tata Motor showroom, in central Mumbai, a roadside cobbler, Maruti Bhandare, paid the equivalent of US$2,819 as an advance payment for a Nano Deluxe. The base model costs around $2,000.

Maruti Bhandare, whose name is also that of Nano's biggest competitor Maruti Suzuki, became a star attraction for TV news channels. Next morning, he was India's most famous Nano hopeful buyer, and possibly Asia's first roadside cobbler to pay 75% up front for a deluxe model car.

Yet many more people like Bhandares could be out there. For the first time in India, advance car-booking forms were provided for the Nano launch, and Tata Motors had sold more than 1 million for the Nano at $6 each since April 1. For the first time, buyers paid 75% and upwards of the total car cost in advance - and that was without being allowed the benefit of a test drive.

Tata Motors could pull in an estimated $1.4 billion from Nano advance bookings. That will be a useful lift for the cash-strapped company, which by June has to service $2 billion of a $3 billion loan incurred in buying British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover.

Tata is struggling with production problems for the Nano, which was unveiled in January 2008. Barely 3,000 Nanos roll out monthly, against the planned annual production of 250,000. To meet demand, Tata Motors, part of the $62.5 billion Tata group, plans to allot 100,000 Nanos in a randomly computer-generated lottery after two months.

Though Tata group chairman Ratan Tata said he is targeting the Nano for small towns, interest was bigger in larger cities, although demand there cut across income groups. Dealers in metropolitan centers such as Kolkata hired more staff and security to deal with the rush.

"To my surprise, even owners of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes cars have bought Nano booking forms, besides the middle class," said KLK Paul, general manager of Nano dealer Wasan Motors in Mumbai.

Paul told Asia Times Online that his three Mumbai showrooms saw 5,000 to 6,000 people, with 1,000 Nano booking forms sold in two days.

Cobbler Bhandare represented one extreme of prospective buyers of the "People's Car", as Tata Motors has dubbed the Nano. "The Nano is based on an emotional desire to provide a safe and affordable mode of transport for Indian families which were exposed to the weather and other dangers," Ratan Tata said in March.

Tata ought to have remembered that emotional responses to problems produce only new problems. Besides production headaches, the Nano has raised questions as to whether it was seducing into car ownership an income group, such as roadside cobblers, who may be vulnerable to the costs of maintaining a car.

Ratan Tata said he embarked on the Nano project after seeing a family riding a scooter in a monsoon night in Mumbai. Yet a parallel question is whether unleashing the world's cheapest car on the world's second-largest middle class can solve transportation problems for the middle class family or increase their daily commuting misery.

TV anchors at the Concorde Nano showroom excitedly hailed Bhandare as the "common man" for whom the Nano was made. Encouraged by a cup of chai, or spicy tea, across the road from his workspot, he laid bare his thoughts to Asia Times Online on why he was prepared to pay nearly twice his annual income as an advance for a car.

Bhandare said he had saved for six years to buy a motorcycle for about $1,000, but began saving an additional $3 daily to buy the Nano when it appeared in 2008. He earns $140 a month, he said, from one of the cupboard-like, tiny roadside shoe shops that dot Mumbai.

Bhandare said he doesn't know how to drive a car and hasn't yet thought of getting a driving license. He had not consulted anyone about buying the car, until he reached the showroom.

How often would he use the car?

"I may use the Nano twice a month to take my family to the temple."

What about monthly expenses to run a car? His "daily car budget" would be "30 rupees [60 US cents]".

That is well short of the costs estimated by a "professional" in the car business, elderly cab-driver Salim Mohammed, who said 2,500 rupees a month would be needed to run a car on the clogged roads of Mumbai, India's financial hub, given use of about 20 kilometers a day. "Less than 1,000 rupees would be needed if the car is taken out sparingly."

So Bhandare could be okay with his 30 rupees daily car budget if his Nano is largely a stationary family showpiece and he doesn't run up garage bills, parking fees and waste fuel in the city's traffic snarls - which the Nano could worsen, their sales helped along by banks.

The Nano could increase India's car-owning population by 65%, according to a Crisil market survey, while 17 leading Indian banks, besides Tata Motors, offer loans with monthly installments starting at $50, the cheapest they have offered for a car.

The State Bank of India's loan eligibility for a Nano mentions as potential borrowers self-employed people earning $2,000 annually to salaried workers pulling in $1,500. An office peon in Mumbai earns $1,900 a year.

Just how well the new car will perform in the testing circumstances of everyday urban traffic will be revealed in the coming weeks. But no question marks remain over the Nano design. It delivered on promises of comfortable inner space. All six feet-plus of this correspondent could fit into the back seat of the 633cc car, with an astonishing five inches of legroom to spare.

"The spacious interior is the biggest surprise," agrees Joseph D'Silva, resident of Aberdeen, Hong Kong, who visited the Concorde Tata Motors showroom. He estimates that the $2,000 Nano in Hong Kong would have running costs of $3,300 a month. "Even though my family can afford a Mercedes Benz, I don't own a car in Hong Kong because public transport is very good," he said. "That should be the way forward for cities such as Mumbai."

Others wanting the Nano as the second family car were more cautious. "My father wanted to buy the Nano, but I said we should wait and watch to see how it fares on the road," said Rishi Bhandoo, advertising manager at The Statesman, a leading English daily from West Bengal state.

Nano relocated its factory site last October from West Bengal, in Singur, following violent political agitation protesting the factory being set up on alleged agricultural land. The alternative factory site in Gujarat state is expected to be fully functioning only from next year.

Bhandare said he won't wait long for delivery of his car. "If I don't get the Nano from the first allotment, I will cancel my booking and buy a motorcycle," he said.

Sometimes in life, we regret having got what we wanted most. So in six months, he and other prospective buyers will know whether they are lucky to own a Nano, or be cursing their desire to have got one. And some will be content sticking with more traditional transport to battle for road space with Nano trendsetters.

Rotten politics and our society

By Samiya Anwar

Can we live without talking to people? No. we cannot. We all know that it is next to impossible. Here come society and the existence of members who dwell into it. We’re part of society. Isn’t it? We aren’t guest here. Aren’t we? According to Aristotle, Man is by nature a political animal. But many think that Politics is irrelevant to their lives. I don’t agree with them. Where is not politics? It is everywhere in every field. Reality hits the head. But politics is in everyone’s lives indeed.

Politics is a complex phenomenon. It is a dirty game. Either you have to PLAY IT or GET USED TO IT. It cannot be separated out of our lives. It has been observed in all human group interactions, including homes, offices, education, media and else everywhere. It is mixed in our lives like quantity of salt in our food. Some people think it is only political leaders running the system who are in politics not themselves. But no. we all are part of political tactics in the vein of the society.

It is no surprise to me when Jaya (name changed), a bank employee complained about her elder sibling trying to be two-facedness with her on continuing job in personal and also sham her husband to stop her going out of the house soon after marriage. She couldn’t understand the double standards of his brother who is he a slave of his spouse. There have been a constant politics in the house. The insecurity breed and the husband and wife developed misunderstanding. This called for help to the couple. It is not just with Jaya, most of the houses are filled with political monsters. People attack right on the faces. Beyond predictions the rifts between the members is deep and raw. The rifts never heal fully and the family drama continues. They just meet at social gatherings and get-togethers to pretend as a family. But nothing is subtle in the paradise. There is always trouble and many things locked inside the bottle.

Very often people want to debunk the personal matters of others. When I was in school I observed steadily my Chemistry teacher always throwing mud on my friend by calling him son of blacksmith. He was poor and pays the tuition fee late every term. It is not his mistake that he was born to a blacksmith and others to some highly educated and professional persons. It always touched me. The teacher’s duty is to teach and not to point a finger at any section of the people.

Nevertheless, these are small quibbles about politics into my perspective. This is an insane world. It is full of people who are overzealous, or use the power of authority as for the wrong purpose. The toughest in all areas is corporate life. With the economic slowdown and no guarantee jobs, frequent hire and fire without any specific reason. If you want to move up the corporate ladder, you must know the political tactics. It can make or break your career, because many sleepless nights one faces with the on-going politics in the offices. In some companies, playing corporate politics is the only job few people have and you become silent victim of the selfish vultures. You were paid for doing some work and you get involve into the other.

When few people gain control over you, life becomes frustrating alike living in Hell. One needs to acknowledge that corporate politics play a role in success. Learn to manage any situation you come across and build professional network. Like how Suresh (name change) working in MNC was fired from the job after giving important two years of his life to the company. He was called in the office and given a pink slip suddenly. Thanks to the professional network and group of people he worked in the past he was called in the previous company and he has a job now. Not all can be fortunate but the professional network he maintained acted as a SAFETEY NET in times of crises.

The society is full of good and bad people. It is like swimming with sharks. Playing politics is not all bad. It acts as a guide and helps to learn. It is a key to survival in the cruel world. A boss can be IDIOT or a LIAR, he is the boss. If you have to work in the company, you need to show some respect and win through impressive skills. In case of any worst scenario be preparing for the worst helps, and hope for the best.

It is hilarious to note the present day’s NEWS channels creating so much hype and stereotype questions in the minds of thousands of people. Media should serve the society. But the POLITICS and MEDIA go hand-in-hand. With the election season as political parties start media for themselves and utilize it for their own selfish ends. The leaders talk more and act less, same is with the media. They don’t really solve the problem, they make an issue of every petty thing for hours making breaking news at every newspaper and TV channels. The role of the media is very much narrowed. It is unfair not to highlight the public with important issues and keep repeating the Cinema news, bollywood gupshups, box-office hits and lows, etc. Also it won’t be anonymous to say that it is we, the people who love the more exaggerated news and interesting programmes like Sansani on Star News. However the media should educate the general public and bring out the sufferings from them by applying awareness to their problems.

Remember, all human relationships have political essence. The society is rotten and also the politics inside it. If in need, take advice from others. Not necessary you use it. But no harm in trying out seeking help from the people you trust. The primary solution to the problem is to RECOGNISE it, PLAY it, also GET USED TO it. There is always a political friction around you everywhere. So best of luck!