Will PCPP balance political scale?

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.