Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (51 page)

Now that the political landscape has settled, however, the FPI and similar organizations can’t rely only on providing mobs to politicians in need. These days, they generate income by protecting public morality. They selectively smash up those bars, nightclubs and brothels that don’t pay them protection money. A friend in the music business told me they demonstrated against Lady Gaga only after her promoters refused to pay them to provide security for her concert. But they do not choose their targets indiscriminately. They never vent their wrath on the porn industry, for example, because it is said to be controlled by the military.

The FPI were quick to spot the market opportunity presented by democracy: an increasingly mouthy, freedom-loving electorate might begin to stand up against the old-fashioned political thugs such as Pancasila Youth. But no one can speak out openly against young men defending Islamic morality; they could move in on protection rackets with impunity.

To me, the FPI and their like are not a sign of the Arabization of Indonesian Islam, but rather the exact opposite. They have taken over the well-established function of preman, and they sell their holiness to the highest bidder. What could be more Indonesian than that?

The Prosperous Justice Party, the PKS, has undergone a similar transformation. Spawned of Islamic study groups at the better secular universities in Indonesia, with help from people who had studied in the Middle East, this party seemed at first to have an ideology as well as a useful social programme. The PKS worked hard in inner cities; they organized against endemic corruption; they outdid the government in responding to floods and disasters, and they provided services to those neglected by the self-serving politicians of the day.

Formed only in 2002, the PKS won over 7 per cent of the national vote in 2004, securing forty-five seats in parliament. They supported a controversial anti-pornography bill, and did even better at the next election. Then a PKS MP was photographed watching porn on his tablet during a plenary session of parliament, and the goody-two-shoes image started to unravel. As PKS politicians joined the cabinet and became knitted in to Indonesian politics, they lost their fervour for reform. The former party chairman starred in a huge corruption scandal centred on efforts to manipulate beef imports.

The Muslim Brotherhood-inspired PKS, now referred to as the
Partai Kotor Sekali
or Very Dirty Party, has been thoroughly Indonesianized, its formerly idealist members woven tightly into the country’s deeply transactional political system. Patronage is proving an effective way of taming religious extremism.

Still Indonesia’s urban middle classes worry. They point to a rash of regulations issued by local governments implementing sharia or Islam-inspired laws as further evidence that the country’s secular basis is being undermined. The mayor who defeated my friend Nazaruddin in elections in the east Aceh city of Lhokseumawe came out with a classic: a by-law forcing women to protect their modesty by riding side-saddle behind a man on a motorbike. Newspaper headlines and tweet streams in Jakarta buzzed with outrage for days. But in the villages and small towns in parts of the country where they are most commonly issued, these religious regulations are seen as no different from any other rules: a simple annoyance. When the young man who had squired me around the trendier coffee shops of southern Aceh had made me hide my jilbab-less head from the Religious Police, I had expressed surprise that they took their duties so seriously. ‘Only towards the end of the month, when their salaries are running out and they want to fine people,’ Reza had replied. Indonesians routinely point out that most of the sharia by-laws don’t affect the people who make the rules. There’s lots of telling women how to dress, but no cutting off the hands of officials who steal from public coffers.

Michael Buehler, a political scientist who tracked sharia regulations in the early years of decentralization, told me that most of the religious by-laws were not put in place by politicians from Muslim parties at all. Rather, it was the old crocodiles from the secular parties of the Suharto era who, seeking legitimacy and support in this new democratic age, had been busy writing sharia into legislation. The game was to suck up to the village-level preachers who were thought to be able to deliver the votes of their congregation. The secular candidates promised that if they got elected with the help of the clerics’ followers, they would pass any sharia by-laws that the preachers drew up.

Lately, though, Michael had noticed a change, especially in the rapidly urbanizing areas of West Java. ‘Sharia regulations on Islamic clothing are
so
2002,’ he joked. Candidates in local elections now tell him that buying off the clerics with promises of sharia laws no longer works in any but the most deprived areas. The middle classes now pay more attention to Facebook and Twitter than they do to Muslim leaders, one candidate had told him. Politicians who want to play the religious card now need to push buttons that light up the interests of individual voters.

The former Governor of Jakarta, Fauzi Bowo, obviously believed that he could push people’s electoral buttons by appealing to religious bigotry. He and I were once neighbours; his official residence was a block away from my former home in Jakarta. In September 2012, at the end of his first five-year term, he was up for re-election. Pak Fauzi and his running-mate both claim to be Betawi, the ‘native’ ethnic group in Jakarta. Both are Muslim. Their opponents were both ‘outsiders’. Though the candidate for governor, Joko Widodo (aka Jokowi) was Muslim, he was from Central Java. If anything, that gave him an advantage over ‘native’ Fauzi, since 36 per cent of Jakarta’s population is ethnic Javanese, against 28 per cent ethnic Betawi. But Jokowi’s running-mate was doubly an outsider: of Chinese descent, and a Christian to boot.

During the campaign, Fauzi Bowo’s team was blatant: Muslims were not allowed to vote for non-Muslim candidates, they said. Voting for anyone but Fauzi would be a vote against God, one well-known preacher told his congregation while the candidate stood at his side. Under Indonesia’s electoral laws, neither politicians nor clerics are allowed to attack their opponents on religious or racial grounds during campaigns. But Fauzi just stood there and beamed.

I happened to be in Jakarta on election day, staying in my old house. I walked out the door, past the Governor’s house, and a minute later was at the polling station set up in the park for the voters of Menteng, a neighbourhood of Dutch-era villas and neo-classical McMansions. Draped in satin, and lit with energy-saving electric lightbulbs, the polling station was furnished with a fridge to keep the drinks cold. It was quite the party atmosphere; ladies dressed in their best silk batiks sat picking delicately at fruit plates while their husbands made important-sounding calls on their BlackBerries. Behind them, uniformed maids kept an eye on children who were racing about on pink scooters or playing vampire games on their iPads.

I chatted with one or two of my neighbours; they fulminated about the incumbent’s ‘black’ campaign and talked confidently of a new era. Then I got on my motorbike and drove fifteen minutes to Tanah Tinggi, a neighbourhood referred to by many of its residents as a slum. In fact, it’s an eclectic mix. There are ramshackle houses cobbled together out of stolen sheets of zinc bolted onto the sides of Dutch-era villas built for ‘native’ civil servants. There are proud new two-storey houses in lurid colours, the fruit of someone’s hard work in another, better-paid province. There are tenements straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, except that in Dickens’s time, there wouldn’t have been so many used hypodermics lying around.

All life seemed to be here, in the two metres of rat run between the tenement blocks. The centre was an open drain, handy for brushing teeth over, slopping cooking water into, and letting your children pee in – the shared bathrooms were way down the alley, near enough to smell but too far to go just for a pee. Ibu Nining, a smiley blob of a woman swathed in yellow, invited me into her home. It was about two metres square, with a ladder up one wall leading to an upstairs of the same size. The room was stacked high with belongings: a flatscreen TV, two huge speakers and a karaoke machine, a rice cooker. A little volcano of plastic toys had erupted, strewing headless dolls across the available floor space. In the middle of the room hung one of those wonderful baby-slings set on a big spring, so that one can bounce the kids to their dreams with a minimum of effort. In it, a boneless two-year-old gaped in sleep. I sat in the doorway – there wasn’t room in the downstairs space for buxom Nining, the baby and me as well as all the stuff. Yet seven of them live in this house; Nining, her husband, the baby and another four children ranging up to sixteen years old.

On the wall opposite was an election sticker that read: ‘Good Muslims vote for Muslims.’ Under it, someone had drawn a handlebar moustache, the symbol of Fauzi Bowo, who was sometimes called ’Tache.
*
It was getting close to poll-closing time. I asked Ibu Nining if she had voted, expecting her to stick up an inked little finger, the universal sign of civic duty discharged. But no. ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘For poor people like us, it’s all the same. It makes no difference who is in charge.’

I picked my way through the needles and slops to the nearest polling station to witness the vote count. The Tanah Tinggi polling station did not have a fridge, satin tablecloths or fruit plates. When it began to rain, officials rushed about moving the ballot papers out of the streams of water that poured though the holes in the tarpaulin roof. But they were all neatly outfitted in batik shirts, all strung about with the ID badges of officialdom, and all extremely diligent in their task.

They had borrowed a karaoke machine over which to announce the results. At all elections in Indonesia, the ballot box is unlocked in public and every ballot paper is pulled out and held up to the light so that everyone can see which candidate has been ‘punched’. Out came the first ballot: ‘Candidate Number 1: Fauzi Bowo!’ the official declared. ‘’Tache! ’Tache!’ shouted the Governor’s supporters. One vote got chalked up on a white board. Witnesses from each campaign kept tallies too.

Out came the second ballot. ‘’Tache! ’Tache!’ The first seven or eight votes were for the incumbent Fauzi Bowo. So playing the religious card does work in Indonesia after all; the thought made me sour. Then there was a run for the challenger Jokowi and his unacceptably Christian partner. It went on like that, swinging in blocks of four or five votes. Perhaps groups of friends or family who came together all voted the same way. As the official reached deeper and deeper into the ballot box, the two candidates were neck and neck. Finally, he came to the last paper, pulled it out, and picked the box up to show us it was empty, like a magician showing us his hat before pulling a rabbit out of it.

The result was seventy-seven votes for the challenger Jokowi, seventy-five for the incumbent Fauzi Bowo, with two votes spoiled. Like Ibu Nining, half of the people registered at this polling station had not bothered to vote. I rushed off to the next nearest post, where the counting was still going on. There, the religiously divisive incumbent was winning comfortably. And at the next post, and the next.

Overall, Fauzi Bowo had won in Tanah Tinggi, one of the most crowded parts of Jakarta, where 40,000 souls are crushed into two-thirds of a kilometre squared. The exit polls, on the other hand, had already declared Jokowi the winner in the city as a whole. There was a triumphalist air to the Twitter stream: ‘’Tache: See what happens when you try to play with religion!’

When I got back to the posh polling station in front of the Governor’s residence, they were just unpinning the last of the satin skirting, and loading the stacking chairs into a catering van. I asked the lead official what the result had been across the three polling stations in our little park: 574 to 186. ‘Who to?’ I asked. He gave me a withering look. ‘Who do you think? Not
him
!’ He nodded his head towards Fauzi Bowo’s house and then turned his attention to his walkie-talkie.

So Jokowi, the Reformer, had won three-quarters of the vote in Menteng, home to the Have Everythings who were doing nicely from the status quo. The people in the slums of Tanah Tinggi, on the other hand, had chosen Fauzi Bowo, a man who had steadily neglected the poor during his twenty years in the upper echelons of the Jakarta administration, the last five of them as governor. It is with these people, the uneducated and the underemployed, the mothers who spend time keeping their toddlers away from used syringes, the fathers who make a living recycling bottles picked out of the garbage of the villas in Menteng, that the religion card seems to play well.

This is in part because where the state fails, the mosque often picks up the slack. The preacher’s door is open to his congregation twenty-four hours a day. He provides small loans for emergency hospital treatment, he writes letters to get children scholarships in school. These gestures have lost currency among the growing middle class, which can take care of itself. But in poor parts of town, and in very rural areas, they still create a web of loyalty that makes the preacher a powerful man among the powerless.