by PANKAJ MISHRA
I first visited Indonesia in 1995. For someone from India, as I was, to arrive in a country that was once part of the Hindu-Buddhist ecumene was to drift into a pleasurable dream where minor figures familiar from childhood readings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata loomed over city squares. The Dutch, unlike the British in India, had inflicted few obviously self-aggrandising monuments on the country they exploited. Squatters now lived in the decaying colonial district of Kota in Jakarta where the Dutch had once created a replica of home, complete with mansions, canals and cobbled squares. By the time I visited, the language of the colonial power had been discarded and a new national language, Bahasa Indonesia, had helped pull together an extensive archipelago comprising more than 17,500 islands and including hundreds of ethnic groups. Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim-majority population (87 per cent), but also large Hindu, Christian and Buddhist minorities, came close to matching India’s diversity. The Nehruvian discourse of non-alignment, secularism and socialism had been eagerly abandoned in India, but Indonesian newspapers still spoke reverently of Pancasila, the national ideology of social harmony vigorously promoted by Suharto, still at this point in power.
Yet Indonesia seemed far ahead of India in its embrace of a form of capitalism honed in the once despised West. Jakarta’s new business district of glass and steel was the envy of Asia’s elites (how could they have known that it had been built by thugs who used murder and rape to evict tens of thousands of people from the areas now covered by skyscrapers?). I was used to the austerity of goods made in India, the shabbiness of our counterfeit modernity, and I remember being struck by the shops abundantly stocked with international brand names and the material possessions that even factory workers seemed to have, with their scooters, televisions and fridges (but no unions to represent them).
I was unaware of the tensions building up, though there had been signs: in 1984, at the time of the Tanjung Priok riots in northern Jakarta’s port area, anti-government posters showed a prominent Chinese crony of Suharto’s pouring dollars into his gaping mouth. The riots were brutally repressed but the rage of the underclass would finally explode in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Indonesia became synonymous with riots, terrorist plots, car bombs, widespread ethnic violence, earthquakes and fires. Suharto was ousted the following year.
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