6 - The Political Economy of Polarization: Militias, Street Authority and the 2019 Elections

Summary

“Joining Pemuda Pancasila has been great for business. I now have over 100 staff, an expanding portfolio and owe a lot of it to them.” Heru pauses to sip his whisky on the rocks. “This ice is supplied by Pemuda Pancasila, best quality in Jakarta.” He was sitting in an upmarket bar in a five-star Jakarta hotel owned by a mid-ranking member of the paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila. The venue and its clientele, consisting largely of fashionable upper middle-class millennials, is seemingly far removed from the street-level thuggery or seedy “nightlife” with which many still associate the paramilitary group and others like it. In his late-twenties and an ethnic Chinese, Heru constitutes the changing face of Pemuda Pancasila, part of a younger generation of an old organization still synonymous for many with political gangsterism and the violent excesses of the New Order regime.

Heru's motivations for membership, situated within the context of what many have argued is Indonesia's deep political polarization around sectarian identity, are both self-servingly pragmatic and “idealistic”. The group's extensive networks, influence and muscle have been an eminently practical means for gaining strategic business advantage in the push and shove of Jakarta's hyper-competitive financial services market. Affiliation with the group has also, he claims, afforded protection at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment has regained political traction. This protection is corporeal but also “ideological”, to the extent that Pemuda Pancasila has long represented itself as a frontline defender of the state ideology of Pancasila from an array of real and imaginary threats, the most historically salient of which has been “communism”. It has been reconfigured in current times as defenders of a “Pancasilaprescribed notion of communal pluralism” and “moderation” in the face of Islamist radicalism and politicized “intolerance”. The irony of seeking protection from an organization with a well-documented history of the targeted persecution of ethnic Chinese was not lost on Heru. “I’ve seen the movie Act of Killing, but you know times have changed. The lines of division and what is at stake are different from the old days.”

For Heru and many others, the huge Islamist mobilizations in 2016–17, pivotal in the electoral defeat and conviction for blasphemy of Jakarta's former governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”), constituted something of a turning point moment.