Since his first campaign for president in 2014, Jokowi’s opponents have encouraged fundamentalist vigilantes and protest groups who accuse him of not being “Muslim enough”. He has responded with repression
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskSuch concerns stem, in part, from the ruling elite’s attachment to religious pluralism. Fully 87% of Indonesia’s 274m inhabitants are Muslim, making it the world’s most populous Muslim country. But it is not a Muslim state: the official ideology emphasises pluralism. Western allies have long celebrated Indonesia for combining widespread piety with a commitment to liberal values.
Politicians began to fret in 2016 when such Islamists emerged as a political force during big demonstrations in Jakarta, the capital. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to decry supposedly blasphemous remarks by Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the city’s governor, who was Christian and a close ally of Jokowi. His bid for re-election faltered.
Concerns about radicalism have some merit. Indonesia has a recent history of violent extremism, with terrorist attacks on tourist sites killing scores of people in the early 2000s. Large minorities of civil servants support radical Islamism. In 2017 Alvara research centre, an Indonesian pollster, found that one in five civil servants and one in ten state-enterprise workers wanted Indonesia to become a Muslim theocracy.
This is despite the fact that the government is using a broad definition of “radicalism”. Making remarks that “insult” the government, or sharing what the task force deems to be “fake news” on social media can be enough to attract its attention. The nebulous criteria, in turn, make it easy to sideline opponents by accusing them of being extremists.
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