Bali waits for Megawati to become Indonesia's president

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR (JP): It's only a few minutes past noon in Denpasar, but already Made Sukra, long known as the best tailor in the neighborhood, has had to turn away a dozen potential customers. It's not that he has more work than he can handle. It's that he has even more important business to attend to. Sukra is busy waiting for Megawati Soekarnoputri.

What was once a successful shop, busy with the clattering noise of sewing machines and the ring of the telephone announcing new orders, is now an empty room. The equipment, the bolts of cloth, the spools of thread and tape measures, all have been sold to raise money to create an informal posko or "command post" for local Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) supporters. Even the sign over the door advertising "clothes made to order" has been replaced by a huge red banner reading saking kawitan tiang sampun PDI-P -- "since the time of our ancestors we've been PDI Perjuangan."

But despite its barren appearance, Sukra's shop is in fact busier than ever before. Already there are at least a dozen men, most of them members of Bali's growing group of unemployed, sitting cross-legged on the floor, shouting out their opinions on current political issues in heated exchange.

Sukra's wife serves them coffee and cigarettes, a look of worry and exhaustion on her face. She talks to herself, frustration creeping into her voice. "I just hope that Mbak Mega becomes president soon," she says. As she pours some rice from her fast-dwindling stock into a cooking pot and lights the fire under the men's meal, she explains that she is trying to see "Mega Mania" as just another episode in the never ending round of Balinese ceremony.

Familiar with the huge amounts of food and drink that must be offered to those participating in events such as cremations and temple anniversaries and the huge drain on household resources these represent, she is determined to wait out the ritual leading up to the choice of Indonesia's next president, hoping that the blessings of God will soon descend on her and her family. She has tried to share her worries about the future of the household with her husband, but he refuses to listen.

"How can you think about your stomach when reformasi (reformation) is at stake?" he challenges her. From her logistic depot in the kitchen, she can hear the sound of the men repeating, in their thick Balinese accents, the new mantras (incantations) of the current political milieu: Money politics, civil society, coalition, dual function, nepotism...

It's afternoon in a small village on the east coast of Bali. Behind the local temple, a space has been cleared for the day's event: A cockfight. But this is not the Balinese cockfight immortalized by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, who sought to describe how Balinese gave meaning to their social world. Nor is this the cockfight that turns the stomachs of timid tourists when they arrive by the bus load to watch the spectacular temple ceremonies in which the battling birds play a starring role.

This is the reformasi cockfight: An informal fund raiser to support Megawati's PDI Perjuangan. Tired of watching a seemingly endless flow of funding enrich the activities of Golkar, the government's party, these villagers have decided on a self-help strategy to further their own political aims. As the birds sink their razor enhanced claws into each others' necks, the spectators comment on the coming General Session, at which members of the newly elected People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) will choose Indonesia's next president, as if it too, were a fight unto death.

"If Megawati doesn't become president, there's going to be bloodshed," one man comments. "But Mega is already president," another man counters. "She's president of the rakyat -- the common people."

By the end of the day, once the police have taken their share, the event has netted some Rp 10 million, or around US$1,300. The funds will be used to support local PDI Perjuangan activities: Gasoline for the motorbikes of the youth who race up and down the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans, bright red T- shirts emblazoned with the PDI Perjuangan's bull symbol and Megawati's smiling face, red paint to cover as many walls, trees, fences and lamp posts as possible, and packages of instant noodles for everyone in the village.

The election may be over, but Megawati fever still burns in Bali. Bank Bali may have gone Golkar, but the Balinese themselves, some 90 percent of whom chose Megawati's PDI Perjuangan this past June, seem thoroughly convinced that victory, and with it large-scale changes in the social landscape, is close at hand. On an island better known for its beaches and its bargains than its political activism, this fanatical factionalism has many shaking their heads, wondering: Just what is going on as the "last paradise" falls prey to party politics?

Local observers have tended to explain Balinese backing of Megawati's PDI Perjuangan in either of two ways. In the first analysis, Balinese are thought to be mired in metaphors of "blood", devoted to Megawati for the simple reason that her father, Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, was the son of a Balinese mother. Just as the blood of sacrifice must flow at certain ritual moments in order to appease the demons of the unseen world, so will Megawati's Balinese blood protect her extended family as Indonesia's future appears uncertain.

According to this narrative, "kinship", rather than "democracy", is the ruling political ideology and Bali is not so much entering the age of reform as regressing to a polarizing past.

The second analysis casts the Balinese in much the same light. People like Sukra and Agung Sumantra are viewed as slavishly following a social script in which their Hindu belief in the awatara, the ruler who will one day come to earth and set matters right, provides the main plot line. Local culture has blinded them to the knowledge of the broader economic and political facts: That even if Megawati is elected president, Indonesia still has a long, hard road to travel to recovery. Sukra and Agung will still be waiting long after Megawati arrives.

More generous analyses include that of one Balinese political observer who explained the local enthusiasm for Megawati as a kind of "politik latah," referring to a psychological syndrome found in Java and Bali whose sufferers compulsively mimic the words of others. Describing how if one Balinese opens a fried chicken stand (or an art gallery, or a sarong shop or a stall selling carved wooden cats) his neighbors will likely copy his successful example, he claims that most Balinese follow Megawati because they feel most comfortable in a crowd.

In a culture where an ethic of individualism has yet to achieve dominance, proclaiming one's allegiance to the current favorite becomes the most sensible political strategy. Thus New Order polls saw nine out of 10 Balinese casting ballots for Soeharto, while the reformasi reckoning saw the same majority swing toward the opposition. But pressures to join the preferred party ranks have taken more repressive forms as well.

During the May electoral campaigns, those Balinese who did not set the PDI Perjuangan flag flying in front of their gates, either because of political apathy or other allegiances, risked having rocks thrown at their homes or being physically attacked by bands of party supporters -- the same kind of intimidation practiced by Golkar gangs in past elections. In this climate, joining the Megawati multitudes becomes a way of ensuring not only smooth social interactions but one's physical safety.

But how far can these analyses, which use Balinese culture to explain Balinese politics, really go in explaining Megawati millenarianism?

Megawati's appeal as an oppositional figure, one who could challenge Soeharto and his government and emerge even stronger for the struggle, has not been lost on the Balinese. The span of Soeharto's rule coincided with the emergence of mass tourism in Bali, a phenomenon which saw a select circle of Balinese become wealthier than ever before, but which left an even larger group landless, their rice fields and homes cleared to make way for golf courses and hotels, most of them owned by international conglomerates and Indonesian elites, including several of Soeharto's children.

The New Order state encouraged this kind of development as the path to Balinese prosperity, all the while channeling the revenues it generated back to Jakarta. But it was not only at the material level that Soeharto's state intervened in Balinese life. Under the New Order, "culture" was strategically cultivated as a substitute for "politics", both as a way to turn potentially explosive regional differences into a stable spectrum of domestic diversity and to provide colorful cultural spectacles that could lure tourists to destinations like Bali.

Balinese were taught, through state programs like Sapta Pesona (the seven enchantments), the kind of personality they needed to cultivate in order to become truly "Balinese" and therefore irresistibly attractive to tourists -- friendly, beautiful, memorable, clean, safe, neat and, above all, orderly. Under the New Order, it in fact frequently became difficult to separate "Balinese culture" from the uses to which it was put.

Megawati's message to the Balinese, delivered during her many visits to the island, posed a direct challenge to the state's agenda for Balinese development.

Tourism, she declared, should benefit not only outsiders but also the Balinese. She urged the Balinese to maintain their culture by not performing traditional arts just for easy profit and by refusing to sell the land of their ancestors to the highest bidder. Megawati's fervent nationalism has also appealed to many Balinese, especially to those who have grown increasingly disenchanted with tourist development on the "enchanted isle". For those who are still waiting for an affluence that has yet to arrive, Megawati's father's famous words, that the West could "go to hell with its aid", seem newly meaningful.

Now, several months later, the campaign posters have begun to fade and tropical green has twined its way up the red-painted tree trunks. In closed door meetings, deals are being cut to negotiate a coalition that might have a chance of bringing a new president to power.

Agung, one of the organizers of the local Megawati campaign, has returned to his job as a waiter at a small hotel, a tourist oasis where he has worked for over 12 years. Earning about $40 a month, he is frequently hard pressed to meet the needs of his family. Despite reassurance by the government that inflation has been halted, his small salary seems less and less sufficient as the months pass.

Recently, he has had to tell his two daughters that he cannot pay the costs -- the school fees, the uniform fees, the book fees -- necessary to send them on to middle school. But for Agung, the failure of PDI Perjuangan to gain a clear majority in the national election for the House of Representatives (DPR) members has hardly dulled his optimism. To him, Megawati is everything. In his eyes, she represents the only hope of escaping from the constant struggle his life has become.

"Later, when Mbak Mega is president, my luck will change," he claims. "I won't have to do this kind of work anymore." So certain is Agung of Mbak Megawati's powers to transform, he has already promised his children that next year, after the presidential election, they can return to school. In the new Megawati millennium, when the waiting is finally over, he predicts that the tourists will just have to wait on themselves.

The writer is a Balinese anthropologist and a former fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, the United States.