Makers of Modern Asia by Ramachandra Guha & Jay Taylor & Rana Mitter & Odd Arne Westad & Srinath Raghavan & Farzana Shaikh & James Rush & Michael D. Barr & Jian Chen & Sophie Quinn-Judge

Author:Ramachandra Guha & Jay Taylor & Rana Mitter & Odd Arne Westad & Srinath Raghavan & Farzana Shaikh & James Rush & Michael D. Barr & Jian Chen & Sophie Quinn-Judge [Guha, Ramachandra & Taylor, Jay & Mitter, Rana & Westad, Odd Arne & Raghavan, Srinath & Shaikh, Farzana & Rush, James & Barr, Michael D. & Chen, Jian & Quinn-Judge, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674365414
Amazon: 0674365410
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 2014-07-27T18:30:00+00:00

Guiding Democracy

Sukarno arrived back in Indonesia in October following the second of his whirlwind tours refreshed and confident. But what he had seen also disturbed him. Much of the world was far in advance of his own country. The United States was industrialized and prosperous. In Russia and China, revolutionary movements were changing life for the better.123 Indonesia, meanwhile, seemed stalled in its postindependence experiment with parliamentary democracy. In a speech later that month, he expressed this frustration openly: “My dream,” he told an assembly of youth leaders, “is that the leaders of the parties would deliberate together and then come to the decision ‘let us now join together to bury all parties.’ ”124

The elections of 1955 failed to resolve the dysfunctionality of Indonesia’s serial coalition governments. So, too, did the constitutional assembly that followed. Mandated to write a new constitution, it broke down along factional lines and brought forth arguments from Muslim-party members that challenged Sukarno’s Panca Sila as the basis of the state. Indonesian patriots who sacrificed themselves in the revolution had not done so for Panca Sila, said assembly delegate Isa Anshari, “They fought to place Islam in the life of our society and state. They fought to establish the Sovereignty and the Law of Islam.”125 The same Muslim groups also voiced vociferous opposition to the growing influence of the country’s Communist Party, to which Sukarno increasingly turned for inspiration and support. In the midst of these fissures arose other signs of disunity; in late 1956, army commanders in parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi staged local putsches by seizing control of the civil administrations in their territories.126

Sukarno now groped for a way to reconcile his country’s divided tribes. In a formal speech before nine hundred leaders gathered at the presidential palace in February 1957, he argued that Indonesia should reformulate its democracy in line with traditional village concepts of deliberation (musjawarah) and consensus (mufakat) under the guidance of an authoritative elder, someone who “did not dictate, but led, and protected.” “Indonesian democracy since ancient times,” he told the crowd, “has been Guided Democracy.”127 This was Sukarno’s new konsepsi. During the next three years Sukarno maneuvered opportunistically to achieve it, employing his constitutional powers as president (subject to his own interpretation) and his growing alliances with the army under his long-since-rehabilitated chief of staff, Abdul Haris Nasution.

All this occurred in a climate of crisis. In March 1957 occurred one of seven attempts on Sukarno’s life—this one, staged at his children’s school, killed eleven people.128 The following year, regional power grabs by the army blossomed into full rebellions in which army officers, senior Muslim leaders affiliated with the Masjumi party (including the former prime minister Mohammad Natsir), and the American CIA were all complicit.129 Nasution and his loyal forces crushed the rebellions, waxing stronger as a result and acting with great latitude throughout the country under a state of war and siege that lasted until 1962.130 The national economy was in extreme disarray, all the worse following the seizure