VII. The Colonial Tradition in India and Indonesia

Abstract

‘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.’