Will PCPP balance political scale?

Public discussion on the significance of the establishment of the Association of Intellectuals for Pancasila Development (PCPP) in July is still going on. Noted intellectual Aswab Mahasin argues that the founding of the new association shows that the old political cleavage remains intact.

JAKARTA (JP): Intellectuals have always been on the news. The more so when they found associations. In Indonesian politics, which is always rich with gestures and symbolisms, this may indicate that something is brewing on the macro-political level.

The establishment of the Moslem intellectuals association (ICMI) some years ago ignited heated debates. The stereotype has been that intellectuals are men of ideas who normally work in solitude for their pursuit of truth and justice.

Questions raised then, therefore, were centered on whether they really needed such an association at all. But most intriguing has been the question of the Islamic label. Should intellectuals associate themselves under such primordial loyalty?

ICMI supporters simply argued that there is nothing wrong with such a label: the Christians had in fact preceded them with an association of Christian Intelligentsia. The Buddhists also have their association of Buddhist intellectuals.

Now things have become more complicated with the founding of the Association of Intellectuals for Pancasila Development, as if to be the nationwide nonsectarian association of intellectuals committed to the state ideology and the idea of development. Rumors about the attempts at founding such a nonsectarian association of intellectuals were heard soon after the founding of ICMI.

Rumors were making the rounds about the founding of Nusantara Intellectuals Association or Ikatan Cendekiawan Kebangsaan (Association of Nationalist Intellectuals), but nothing was heard of them after the setting up of PCPP.

What is behind all these symbolic gestures?

One thing is clear: Indonesian intellectuals have always mingled with politics. More than fifty years ago they were in the forefront of the movements for independence. Most founding fathers were prominent intellectuals, and it was through their interpretation of history and the nature of colonialism that they found the idea of the nation, the struggle of independence and the foundation of the nation-state.

They proclaimed independence, they framed the constitution, they found and led political parties and most of them were either in government, in the parliament, in the press, or in any other institutions of public life. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they indeed have run the nation from the beginning.

But the word "intellectuals" has more than its conventional (or Western) definition. Here it means, generally, "the educated elite". It covers university graduates, but also those well- educated artists, writers, or even poets. Many of them work inside the state bureaucracy, universities, research institutions, business companies and even in the media.

They are in fact closer to the notion of "the strategic elite" as defined by Suzanne Keller. And in a more general sense they are the pattern setters of the new middle class born after independence and now in the process of asserting themselves in public. It is no wonder that they have become the most strategic magnet for any political scenario.

Growing up in a plural society, the strategic elite too represents this plurality. They not only associate themselves along their academic discipline or professions, but also according to their cultural orientations and traditions. The fact that Islam and other religious traditions are still functioning as rallying points beside "secular nationalist" orientation indicates that the old politico-cultural cleavage remains as deep as ever.

The attempts of the New Order government to deideologize politics seem to be effective only at the formal-political level, but not at the cultural roots, which seems to stay intact. Some would say that is retrogressive, but others would say that this is the creative adjustments of traditions in their interactions with modernity.

No doubt even intellectuals, who have been reputed as agents of modernization for so long, still keep their primordial loyalties intact, at least as some kind of group identity.

Certainly politics plays a role here. ICMI has rallied behind the minister of research and technology, B.J. Habibie. A new prominent figure is to be elected at the forthcoming congress of PCPP in November. He could be a Moslem but perhaps of less santri, i.e. less affiliated culturally with the devout Moslem groups. But certainly he must be somebody who is acceptable to the President.

Politically speaking this would create a new balance: the Moslems on the one hand and the secular nationalists on the other. A replica in miniatur of the classical cultural politics and of classical wisdom of keeping rival powers in balance. Each side would have to cling to the central axis, just to remain in place. It is the central axis which is really important, not those intellectual associations which have to weigh themselves on the scales.

The writer is deputy director of Foundation for Sustainable Development.