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VII. The Colonial Tradition in India and Indonesia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
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‘Given the circumstances facing Indonesian governments in the years 1950–57’, a standard history of Indonesia comments, ‘it is not surprising that the democratic experiment foundered, for there were few foundations upon which representative democracy could be built. Indonesia inherited from the Dutch and Japanese the traditions, assumptions and legal structure ofa police state. The Indonesian masses – mostly illiterate, poor, accustomed to authoritarian and paternalistic rule, and spread over an enormous archipelago – were hardly in a position to force politicians in Jakarta to account for their performance. The politically informed were only a tiny layer of urban society and the Jakarta politicians, while proclaiming their democratic ideals, were mostly elitists and selfconscious participants in a new urban superculture. They were paternalistic towards those less fortunate than themselves and sometimes simply snobbish towards those who, for instance, could not speak fluent Dutch. They had little commitment to the grass-roots structure of representative government and managed to postpone elections for five more years. A plant as rare as representative democracy can hardly grow in such soil.’
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Itinerario , Volume 13 , Special Issue 1: India and Indonesia: General Perspectives , March 1989 , pp. 95 - 108
- Copyright
- Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1989
References
Notes
1 Ricklefs, M.C., A History of Modern Indonesia (London and Basingstoke 1981) 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 This was less true of the period 1950–1957 when there was a form of democracy in Indonesia, but the comparison is probably valid even then. One should note that Ricklefs adds that ‘because of the elite commitment to the idea of democracy, the years 1950–57 stand as the freest period of Indonesian history for the politically articulate’. Ibidem. But this was also a period of chaos.
3 Tholen, Hans ed., Indonesia and the Rule of Law(London 1987)Google Scholar.
4 When I read the original version of this paper, one or two foreigners were outraged by this statement. No Indonesians protested to me, and I do not think their exquisite politeness, so striking a contrast to Indian manners, was the only reason.
5 During the Emergency in India, of course, there were various curbs on the universities. Sanjay Gandhi's birthday was celebrated, and seminars held on the Twenty Point Programme, but even this was better than the compulsory burning of Western books and compulsory courses on Pancasila described in Watson, C.W., Stale and Society in Indonesia: Three Papers, Occasion paper No. 8, Centre of South-East Asian Studies, University of Kent. (September 1987)32Google Scholar.
6 Following the criteria for democracy laid down by Freedom House: freedom of expression, association, elections, etc., Sklar identified 31 Third World democracies in 1986 of which only two were in Asia: India and Turkey; Sklar, Richard N., ‘Developmental Democracy’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 29, 4 (October 1987) 691Google Scholar.
7 Of the very few books on the history of civil liberties in India which I have found, one is Bharat Mishra, Civil Liberty and the Indian National Congress, Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadyaya, 1969. The author argues that after 1947 Congress did not live up to the ideals of civil liberty it had championed earlier. This was for three reasons: first, Nehru and his contemporaries moved away from the earlier ideals of individualism and liberty to democratic socialism; secondly, the Congress inherited ‘the vicious tradition of the colonial government which was callous to all ideas of freedom’, and, finally, satyagraha had legitimised disobedience to legally constituted authority. The theme is an important one, but the treatment is slight and simplistic.
8 There are sharp differences of opinion even about Mughal India, for which there are relatively good data. Irfan Habib puts the realised land revenue at one-third to one-half the gross produce but I have argued that these were only theoretical rates and the actual collections were almost certainly much lower; Habib, Irfan and Raychaudhuri, T. eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India I (Cambridge 1982) 298Google Scholar; Kumar, Dharma, ‘The Taxation of Agriculture in British India and Dutch Indonesia’ in: Bayly, C.A. and Kolff, D.H.A. eds., Two Colonial Empires (Dordrecht 1986) 203–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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30 It even figures in the recent upheavals in the communist world! A recent report in the New York Times by Flora Lewis stated that ‘China has asked many countries, including India, for advice on setting up a real Civil Service, because it has come to see that diluting central party control makes it essential. The Indians replied that their effective civil service, imposed by the British in the mid-19th century was modelled on the old Chinese Mandarinate. Key principles were entrance by examination, promotion by merit, and posting people away from their home areas to avoid corrosive demands of family and friends.’ Unfortunately, I have since been informed that this is apocryphal.
31 The Times of India, September, 1987.
32 N. Ram, ‘An Independent Press and Anti-Hunger Strategies’ (Paper presented at WIDER, Helsinki, July 21 to 25, 1986). The paper was written in the context of Sen's contrast of India with China, where the press was not free.
33 The evolution of control over the press and books is traced in Barrier, N. Gerald, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India, 1907–1947 (Columbia 1974)Google Scholar.
34 Fortunately, Professor P.S. Gupta is working on the history of radio.
35 Wadhwa, D.C., ‘Executive Law Making: Lesson from East India Company’, Journal of the Indian Law Institute, 28, 2 (April–June 1986) 197.Google Scholar The Prime Minister of India needs these reminders too.
36 Famine was a very much less serious problem in Indonesia though there were a few in the nineteenth century, see e.g. W.R. Hugenholtz, ‘Famine and Food Supply in Java 1830–1914’ in: Bayly and KolfTeds., Two Colonial Empires.
37 Sen, Amartya, Food Battles, Coromandel Lecture, New Delhi 1982Google Scholar.
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