B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta – Unlike most accounts these days, this note is not a paean to Sri Mulyani Indrawati; neither is it a swan song for her departure. It is rather an acceptance of a brutal reality that a system based on corrupt public officials does not take kindly to one of its children who refuses to be corrupt. What is left in the wake is less a need for lamentation than a calculus on what lies ahead.

As is well known by now, what is left in the wake is a political cartel evasively called "The Coalition's Joint Secretariat", with the boss of the Golkar Party, Aburizal Bakrie, sitting as the executive chairman.

As expected, soon after the Joint Secretariat was made public, a chorus of denials was bombarded against our strong conviction that Sri Mulyani's exit is the price President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had to pay for a coalition deal with the Golkar boss.

It is a way of securing survival from the threats of various political exploits adroitly played through a game of votes in the legislature. They expect us to believe there is no such deal. Do you believe it?

I don't believe a single word. Not because I know the hard truth, but because I know that they have every reason not to set the truth in the open. That is part of the game and we should not join the rule of their game.

The fact that it is persuasion and not sheer violence that lies at the heart of democratic politics has a tragic implication: The true reason a politician adopts tactical moves is bound to be different from the reasons by which they publicly defend it.

That is why it is ludicrous to believe in the denial of the deal. The louder the denial, the more crystal clear the truth is that the deal has made up the heart of the matter.

Indeed, the silence on the concept of "deal" is not a sign of its absence but its presence.

Here comes the tragic importance of deceit in the raw brutality of politics. A regime in desperate need of stronger legitimacy has created its own cave-prison; i.e., since deceit has been adopted as an instrument to gain legitimacy, a series of further deceits will haunt the legitimacy problem of the same regime.

The regime will simply end up acquiring the disease it was trying to cure, and we are bound to see more lies as part and parcel of the coalition politics.

But let us give them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that out of lies a genuine coalition of reform could arise – depending on what the coalition was established for.

What is agonizing is that the reasons of its establishment can never be expected to come out from the claims made by the Joint Secretariat's PR people. Nor can it be taken from the apparently lofty words rehearsed by the President.

Do you then believe that the Joint Secretariat is established for the common good? Or that the secretariat is set up to initiate genuine reform of graft-ridden Indonesia?

I don't, and the reason is plain. Although the link between Sri Mulyani's exit and the Golkar boss's entry can never be publicly ascertained, it can easily be gauged from the fact that it was Sri Mulyani, and not other less reform-minded state officials, who had to make an exit.

The story of their political animosity is well known. But, why did Sri Mulyani's exit coincide with the Golkar boss's entry?

Even if the causal link between the two remains secretly intact, there is nothing to prevent us from seeing that the former was the effect of the latter. There is also no need to rehearse widely public knowledge that the former has been an itch and a nemesis to the latter's business interests.

Of course, the reason that triggers something needs to be kept distinct from the way the same thing will evolve. The reason that triggered Sri Mulyani's exit and the Golkar boss's entry is one thing, how the Joint Secretariat will evolve is quite another. But there is seldom a case in which an evolving state of affairs succeeds in shaking off the real causes as to why it happened in the first place. Such is the logic of the cave-prison in politics.

This is alarming for democratic politics in this country. It is a warning that the art of governing will again be emptied of a reform agenda, whose urgency has lately presented itself in the starkest form – of various public revelations about high-level graft besetting the National Police, the Tax Office, the Attorney General's Office, legal profession, colossal tax evasions by businesses, among others.

Such is the looming prospect that this Joint Secretariat brings. But these are politicians who like to believe that things will turn out well, especially when it involves the consequences of their own decisions and actions.

It can only be expected that they will then always dismiss or diminish any warning from others.

Then we are caught in a quandary. But suppose we are willing to take a risk by courting their claim – on the feeble grounds that a political game is not simply a matter of throwing the rascals out, as their exit will be replaced by other rascals just as bad as the initial ones.

Then suppose that we have to make a compromise. Since they hardly listen to anything that upsets their liking, and since they claim that the secretariat is established for something good, let us challenge them with a test case that cannot but be defined as self-evidently good. Here is the test case.

We demand that the coalition's Joint Secretariat solve the Lapindo mudflow tragedy in Sidoarjo, East Java, whose victims have been deprived of justice for so many years.

If their coalition politics succeeds in solving this human-caused tragedy – and politics is supposed to address this sort of tragedy befalling so many citizens – then perhaps the coalition's Joint Secretariat deserves our initial assent. Otherwise, it is simply an act of looting the future for the convenience of the present.

[The writer is a lecturer of the postgraduate program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.]