Jakarta – A funny thing happened on Sunday when President Abdurrahman Wahid went sailing with his top military commanders.
"I do not like it when my generals play politics with my acting State Secretary," he told his service chiefs and their commander-in-chief on the naval vessel Arun in the middle of Jakarta Bay.
"Why are some officers getting together with Bondan Gunawan to discuss politics. Why, I never asked for Lt-General Agus Wirahadikusumah to be made Kostrad chief. Did Bondan ask you to promote him in my name?" he proceeded to confound Admiral Widodo.
As some of the chiefs huddled on Monday with their advisers to ponder if their wildest hope was about to be fulfilled – that the President would remove the thorn in their side, the non-government activist now running rampant in government – he delivered the coup de grace.
Pulling off what a palace aide calls a "replay of Wiranto", Mr Abdurrahman summoned two local journalists on Monday evening to pass on the tip that his acting State Secretary was going to resign. Three hours later, Mr Bondan Gunawan had no choice but to announce his immediate resignation at a hastily called press conference.
By then he already knew his days were numbered; with news leaks all but implicating him in what has become known as Bulogate, he told a meeting of his staff last Monday that "his time was up". Bulogate merely provided his critics with additional ammunition, and the palace a convenient cover, to push him out.
The sudden rise and fall of Mr Bondan is a morality play with a fascinating cast of characters: A "bad bird" of a general whose rise to power threatened to destabilise a depoliticising military; a vice-president upset that he tried to hijack her party flag; and a constant parade of businessmen passing through a well-greased revolving door – including a masseur and a deputy Bulog chief who never got what he paid for.
Mr Bondan overplayed his hand when he rammed through the promotion of Lt-Gen Agus – a "bad bird" who broke ranks by criticising his superiors – over the objections of senior officers.
True, the President did think highly of the general and thought he could speed up the military's retreat from politics.
But isolated overnight, the new Kostrad chief lost any effectiveness he might have had as the generals who considered themselves "professional soldiers" sought their own lines of access to the President to press their case against him and Mr Bondan. And they found no shortage of insiders ready to lobby on their behalf.
A senior general who met Mr Abdurrahman two weeks ago to assure him of the Indonesian military's (TNI) total loyalty and warn him against being used by politicised generals with no mass backing, told The Straits Times then that if there was no "counter-attack" from Mr Bondan, it would not be long before the aide found himself out in the cold.
Unfortunately for him, he and his political master, the President, had opened two separate, festering wounds in Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri's party – the Indonesian Democratic Party-Perjuangan (PDI-P).
At the PDI-P's March congress, Mr Bondan antagonised Ms Megawati no end when he allegedly tried to buy his way into the secretary-general's post, infecting her local district chiefs with "the culture of money politics". A patiently fuming Ms Megawati found her chance to strike back at him last month when Mr Abdurrahman sacked one of her party elders from the Cabinet – former State Enterprises and Investment Minister Laksamana Sukardi – on alleged charges of corruption and nepotism.
With the President due to account for his first and largely confusing year in office before a highly critical People's Consultative Assembly in August, he has recently rediscovered the necessity of mending political fences with his erstwhile allies. If a quid pro quo with the quiet but still popular Ms Megawati required Mr Bondan's departure from government, so be it.
If sacking former military chief Wiranto, Islamic party boss Hamzah Haz, Golkar's Jusuf Kalla and PDI-P's Laksamana was about consolidating Mr Abdurrahman's power base, now is the time to find a new balance before these parties ganged up against him come August and embarrassed him with inconvenient questions.
Questions like why the State Audit Board discovered mark-ups in supplies to the palace, a result of kickbacks to certain officials around the President? Or more fundamentally, is access to the president for sale?
Suffice to say that the first reaction of the President's surviving close aide, Mr Marsillam Simanjuntak, whose puritanism is legendary, to Mr Bondan's resignation is one of "relief".
But the real question remains – if a political sacrifice were not demanded to balance the power see-saw, would the whiff of corruption have been enough for the President to push out one of his closest aides and establish that absolutely no one is above the law?