Rohana Kuddus – Leapfrogging from a provincial furniture factory to become President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo was greeted by a Time magazine cover hailing him as 'A New Hope' for the world.

He swept into office in 2014 on a wave of promises – clean government, a crackdown on corruption, a 'slim' parliamentary coalition with minimal horse-trading, improved economic growth and infrastructure, better access to basic health and education support. Tempo, the flagship Jakarta weekly, celebrated with a cover photo of Jokowi moshing in their editorial office even before the vote was officially counted. Fifteen years on from the overthrow of the Suharto dictatorship amid the turmoil of the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, it seemed that the grip of the tycoons and generals who had cemented their power over Indonesia under Suharto's New Order might finally be weakening. Symbolically, Jokowi's defeated opponent in 2014 was Suharto's son-in-law Prabowo, a millionaire general responsible for serial atrocities in East Timor and for repressing the democracy movement in 1997-98. Five years later, however, after increasing his majority in the 2019 elections, Jokowi appointed Prabowo as Minister of Defence, in a cabinet that boasted a notorious police chief as Interior Minister, another general as Minister of Religion, and tech and media barons overseeing education and the nationalized industries.

Numerous books about Jokowi have been published in Indonesia, but most veer towards hagiography; his (ghost-written) autobiography is, naturally, self-satisfied. Ben Bland's Man of Contradictions is the first English-language biography to appear. Bland, a former reporter for the Financial Times, later foreign-policy analyst and the director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute in Australia, is critical of this puffery. But he also declines to see Jokowi as 'a man who has fallen from grace and sold out the promise of reform', viewing him instead as an 'enigmatic figure', a bundle of contradictions trapped by the historical contradictions of the country he rules – 'a nation that charms, confuses, and confounds in equal measure'. In other words, rather than simply telling Jokowi's life story, Bland wants 'to use the incredible tale of the small-town furniture maker turned world leader [sic] to shed some light on the story of Indonesia', so as to understand where Jokowi and this vast archipelagic nation are heading. This is quite a tall order to complete in less than two hundred pages. But Man of Contradictions can also tell us something about mainstream Western ideas of what is 'wrong' with our country.

Hashing out the media cliches – 'a simple boy from a simple family', 'the underdog challenger' who grew up in 'a riverside shack', yet could 'electrify an election campaign without saying much' – Bland retains some of the conventional guff about Jokowi's modest upbringing. But he also provides enough evidence to dismiss it. While Jokowi may not have had the personal wealth of Indonesia's Top Hundred business and political elites, he was by no means destitute. He was born in 1961 to a struggling middle-class family in the provincial city of Solo (Surakarta), central Java – his father made a living selling bamboo furniture. Jokowi took a degree in forestry at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta and worked in his uncle's furniture factory before setting up his own in the late 1980s. He proved adept at extracting loans from the Suharto government's small-business programme, and by 1991 was a fixture on the international furniture expo circuit. By the time friends in Solo were canvassing him as a possible candidate for the 2005 mayoral elections, Jokowi was a dollar millionaire – a wealthy 'emerging patrician', in Bland's phrase – while his wife had opened a large wedding hall, catering to the city's aspirational business class, and their children were studying in Singapore. Two years later Jokowi was setting up a timber venture in financial cahoots with ex-military tycoon Luhut Pandjaitan, a former us-trained commander of Suharto's 'Hunter Killer' Special Forces in East Timor, now expanding his mining and forestry interests. Luhut would later be President Jokowi's Chief of Staff, with special responsibility for trade, investment, mining and energy.

Bland's account offers some antidote to media portrayals and common perceptions – crafted and honed for years by Jokowi – of the hardships the president had to overcome on the way to the top. He also rightly stresses that Jokowi had the advantage of looking like a fresh outsider in a country where politics have for decades been dominated by the families of oligarchs and generals, presiding over a civil service notorious for absenteeism and neglect of its duties. In Solo, Jokowi made a practice of blusukan, a Javanese word for impromptu spot checks – descending with his retinue upon a slum neighbourhood or street market to listen to the problems of the wong cilik – 'small folk' – and set them right. 'Pencil-slim, word-shy', with his trade-mark exclamation of kerja, kerja, kerja! ('work, work, work!'), Jokowi maximized his persona as a popular man-of-action during his seven years as Mayor of Solo. Bland shows that, rather than reforming the system at City Hall or restructuring the bureaucracy, Jokowi pushed persistently for concrete, incremental improvements. For all its limitations, this was a record that paid electoral dividends. It would be lionized by the media in his 2012 campaign for Governor of Jakarta and his leap to the presidency two years later. Importantly, however, Jokowi's talent for blusukan was matched by his ability to corral the support of local and national elites through his flair for what Bland calls 'retail politics'; it was they who supplied him with the cash and contacts that drive electoral politics in post-Suharto Indonesia. Cameron Hume, the US Ambassador to Indonesia, was another fan of the 'dynamic and immensely popular' mayor. Bland comments drily: 'This knack for charming foreigners would prove indispensable to Jokowi later in his career.'

The methods Jokowi honed in Solo had a certain folksy charm and worked relatively well in the early days at provincial-city level. They remained his default procedure when he moved to the national stage. But however carefully stage-managed, blusukan was inoperable as a mode for managing a population approaching 300 million, or steering a federal state of three dozen ministries, plus hundreds of directly elected governors, mayors and regents. Already overstretched in Jakarta, Jokowi's can-do approach crumbled in national politics. Today, with a bloated coalition around him, he can no longer play the card of the outsider. 'The very facets of his personality that made him such a good city mayor would, in the end, limit his ability to pull off the radical changes Indonesia needs', writes Bland. The contradictions between Jokowi's man-of-the-people image and his reliance on elite backers became 'ever more apparent': he had no plan for how to manage the ranks of 'oleaginous politicos, tycoons and generals that lined up around him' as they sensed power shifting to a new leader. Man of Contradictions has few illusions about Jokowi, describing him as a 'pragmatic' figure, who has 'rarely shown much outward ambition or interest in politics', and 'often makes policy on the hoof, without any solid analytical basis'. The reason for such myopia, according to Bland, lies in his background: 'if you want to understand Jokowi the politician, you must understand Jokowi the furniture maker'. His book attempts to use this dictum as a key to unlock the meaning of Jokowi's decade in office for Indonesia's economy, democracy and foreign policy.

Predictably, as a man from the FT, Bland diagnoses Indonesia as suffering from a legacy of 'post-colonial hostility to economic liberalism', whose symptoms include 'a deep historical scepticism' towards Western notions of free trade. The country's besetting sin is protectionism, for which Sukarno's rhetoric of self-reliance and the family basis of the traditional economy share the blame. Bland had originally hoped Jokowi would be a liberal economic reformer who would finally 'set the good ship Indonesia on the correct course'. He confesses his disappointment. 'Protectionism runs much deeper in Indonesia than many economists like to admit', he insists, arguing that in this too Indonesians are contradictory, if not hypocritical – while complaining about the import of foreign beef, they prefer it to domestic meat. Jokowi's quest for foreign investment but rhetoric of self-sufficiency are expressions of this national pathology. Bland supplies a long list of questionable infrastructure projects, stymied by lack of coordination across government departments and exacerbated by Jokowi's 'ad hoc leadership style'.

Tensions between electoral democracy and 'illiberalism' are framed in a similar argument. While touching on the president's meddling with the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), and the growing number of military men he has rewarded, Man of Contradictions sees the high-profile downfall of Ahok, Jokowi's successor as Governor of Jakarta, ousted under Islamist pressure, as the main evidence for a 'rising tide of authoritarianism'. In Bland's view, Ahok's 'uncompromising but effective approach' to running Jakarta put him on course to be re-elected in 2017 (in fact, he had not been elected in the first place, simply sliding into the position of governor when Jokowi jumped to the presidency). But when Ahok – a Chinese Christian in a Muslim-majority city – made a casual reference to the Koran, the issue was swiftly exploited by his opponents. As anti-Ahok protests swelled in December 2016, Jokowi himself joined them, to 'defuse' the situation. In abandoning his former ally, Bland argues, Jokowi gave credence to the demands of 'intolerant hardliners' – a defeat for democracy and pluralism in Indonesia. Ahok was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for blasphemy. But this is not to say the furniture-maker himself has become an ideological authoritarian: Jokowi has never had a political philosophy, Bland avers. He has simply been shaped by the winds that swirl around him.

So, too, with foreign policy. Jokowi didn't bother to attend the annual un General Assembly meetings during his first term – according to Bland, he prefers the G20 and APEC summits, which are all about trade and investment deals, whereas the un expects payments from its members – and has 'no strong sense of where he wants Indonesia to go'. Stumbling from one foreign-policy dilemma to another, taking a 'scattergun' approach to tensions in the South China Sea, Jokowi lacks any sense of grand strategy. But here again his government reflects the contradictions of Indonesia's post-independence history. Like Sukarno, Bland writes, Jokowi talks of Indonesia's self-sufficiency – 'we have the natural resources and the human resources, all we need is good management' – while using foreign policy to attract investment. Favouring whoever promises 'the most cash and the fewest conditions' leads to closer ties with China, at a time when the US is 'desperate' for regional partners. The upshot of Jokowi's incoherent vision is 'an Indonesia that confounds – seesawing between nationalism and globalism.'

This, then, is the balance sheet of Man of Contradictions: Jokowi has made growth the centrepiece of his administration, but he has been unable to square the desperate need for foreign investment with a culture of protectionism and scepticism towards economic liberalization. As a 'democratic reformer', he has been 'caught between the promise of democracy and the deep roots of authoritarianism in Indonesia.' He has called for religious tolerance and diversity, but has ended up 'co-opting, or being co-opted by', the forces of conservative Islam. How does Bland explain this record? Essentially, in terms of the transactional personality of Jokowi, and by extension the culture of Indonesia. For Jokowi's contradictions are those of his society, with its 'authoritarian roots and its democratic promise'.

Before addressing this explanation, it is worth setting out some of the limitations of Bland's account and the blinkered vision they reveal. To start with the economy: criticism of Jokowi's performance as insufficiently liberal is not accompanied by any conspicuous interest in whether it has been responsibly social. Only 20 per cent of Indonesians can be classed as 'economically secure' and, while official unemployment has gradually fallen, under-employment remains widespread. Pre-pandemic growth rates of around 5 per cent under Jokowi – slower than Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, though faster than Thailand – have failed to generate decent job creation. Underlying this is a trend which economic liberalism can only exacerbate. Since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, Indonesian manufacturing has contracted, ceasing to be the engine either of growth or of job creation. By contrast, as Muhtar Habibi and Benny Hari Juliawan spell out in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (2018), mining has thrived, with licenses jumping from about 600 in 1999 to 10,000 in 2013, and now makes up 22 per cent of export values.

But mining is also land-hungry, exacerbating rural dispossession and environmental destruction, contributing only a paltry 1.4 per cent to employment. Meanwhile, World Bank and Oxfam studies report that the gap between the richest and the poorest has grown faster than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, leaving Indonesia with the world's sixth-worst ranking in wealth disparity. The country's Gini coefficient hit a level over 0.45 in 2018. Bland concedes that 'tens of millions have been left behind' and 'Indonesia still suffers from high levels of deprivation', but such admissions are marginal to his narrative. Similarly, his condescension about foreign-beef consumption is jaw-dropping in its social assumptions: beef is an inordinately expensive source of protein compared to tempeh, tofu, eggs, fish or chicken. Indonesian meat consumption is among the lowest in the world. The OECD reckons that Indonesians consume only 2.4 kg of beef per capita per year, compared to over 18 kg in Australia and 26 kg in the US.

Man of Contradictions rightly observes that Jokowi has 'no lucid vision of how he wants to remake the economy'. Yet using the lens of Jokowi's personality scarcely explains why similar problems plagued his predecessors. Inadequate infrastructure, gaping inequality and 'economic nationalism' persisted under Yudhoyono, despite his contrasting personality, penchant for strategic analysis and the benefit of booming commodities. More to the point, both are products of the post-Suharto transition, in which – as Max Lane argues in Continuity and Change after Indonesia's Reforms (2019) – the dictatorial regime was restructured as a multiparty system to ensure the continuity of the socio-economic relations inherited from the New Order.

Bland's account of Ahok's ouster also fails to reckon with the skewed social relations in play. There is no discussion of the way Jakarta's provincial government under Ahok carried out hundreds of forced evictions in 2015 and 2016 – displacing more than 16,000 poor families, according to the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute's 2016 report, Seperti Puing ('Like Rubbish'). Yet, amid yawning inequality and under-employment, this was a major issue in the 2017 gubernatorial debates. Bland does not mention that Ahok was released early from prison, or that Jokowi then appointed him Presidential Commissioner to the state-owned oil and gas giant, Pertamina. Ahok's name was also floated for managing the relocation of Indonesia's capital from Jakarta to a remote location in Kalimantan, the boondoggle of a 'Jokopolis' fancied by the president. The treatment of Ahok was thus not simply a case of Jokowi cutting an ally adrift to save himself by appeasing religious conservatives. Bland's insistence upon a narrative pitting illiberalism against pluralism detracts attention from the larger pattern of broad-based socio-economic grievances – an increasingly skewed distribution of wealth, growing inequality of income, predatory elite patronage and cynical transactionalism – that require the threat of coercion for their continued reproduction. Man of Contradictions also overlooks the drift towards 'repressive pluralism', already underway, where in the name of Indonesian tolerance more discriminatory, securitized measures can be taken against loosely defined 'Islamists'. As Greg Fealy discusses in a recent contribution to the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (2020), under Jokowi's – no doubt, distant – oversight, more systematic and far-reaching state efforts to battle the dangers of Islamist 'extremism' and 'radicalism' have been initiated, mostly outside of public view, including through opaque surveillance and vetting programmes.

What of Bland's explanation for the 'authoritarian roots' of Indonesian culture? In perhaps the most revealing sentence of his book, he remarks of the post-Suharto transition that 'by opting for a process of graduated change from within rather than a revolution, Indonesia avoided the immense bloodshed and extreme uncertainty that would have accompanied efforts to truly dismantle the ancien regime.' The sigh of relief is nearly audible. No pang of regret at the massacres of 1965-66 on which the New Order was built – bloodshed incomparably vaster than anything that clearance of the debris of Suharto's tyranny would have involved – crosses the page. Of course, 'the price of a mostly smooth and peaceful transition has been to leave Suharto-era figures and institutions with a seat at the table.' But that is no cause for concern, for 'what is different today is that these players need to work through politicians who have genuine popular appeal in order to win in Indonesia's mostly free and fair elections.'

In other words, the continued gagging of the past and beatification of Suharto-era figures and institutions in today's oligarchic system is scarcely a problem for democracy in Indonesia, since these are covered by genuinely popular politicians, elected, as Bland repeatedly emphasizes, on 'turnouts that put Western democracies to shame'. Absent from this pleasing image is any attention to the machinery of electoral rules and campaign finances, of social intimidation, manipulation of religion and media concentration that have neutered elections as meaningful choices for the bulk of citizenry (much of this is documented in Ross Tapsell's Media Power in Indonesia, 2017). For Bland, Jokowi is the triumphant winner of 'two resounding victories in the world's biggest direct presidential election – divisive Indonesian politicians cannot hide behind an electoral college as they can in the United States.' Yet though Indonesia has no electoral college of the American sort, this is still a cut-throat system of dysfunctional political financing, tight nomination and party-entry thresholds and deeply embedded Suharto-era personalities and institutions; an arena that favours candidates with ample economic resources, broad media presence and connexions to oligarchic capital. Bland admits that Indonesian parties 'operate more as vote-getting machines at election time and patronage distribution machines once in power', but closes his eyes to the structural forces governing the character of competition between them.

He contents himself instead with the thought that 'unhelpfully for outsiders looking for straightforward analytical frameworks, there are no easy dividing lines over ideology or policy. There is no left-wing versus right-wing split, as we see in many democracies.' Yet across Asia, the disappearance of divisions between right and left – cleavages clustering instead around dynastic, communal, regional or factional conflicts – is a feature of many societies, including democracies, suffering from what Wang Hui has called 'depoliticized politics' (NLR 41) after the traumatic suppression of their past. How much more is this true of Indonesia, where over half a million people were murdered, tortured or ostracized in 1965 and any discussion of Marxism or Communism is still legally and hysterically banned – as increasingly now too any serious criticism of the government. (A draft revision to the penal code, RKUHP, recently circulated after discussion in parliament, contains an article outlawing insults that 'violate the dignity of the president or the vice president' in public or on social media, with charges of three years' imprisonment or a $14,000 fine.)

Bland notes the anti-Communist ban in passing, only to discover a 'curious analogy' between the paranoid fears of the Indonesian military and warnings from the ruling parties in China and Vietnam of plots by 'hostile foreign forces'. Though an echo of bygone red scares might be expected from the Lowy Institute, official xenophobia is obviously not confined to Communist countries. As more and more countries struggle to make democracy great again, amid soaring inequality, un(der)employment, tokenized diversity, and popular protests against all of these, to think otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand. Man of Contradictions is not unaware of some of the deficiencies of political life within such parameters. But rather than untangling the historical forces shaping them, Bland suggests that the proper response to Jokowi and the society he rules is 'a heavy dose of realism about the nature of both Indonesia and the man'. While 'wide-eyed human-rights activists' may have interpreted Jokowi's evolution into an unscrupulous transactional politician as a sign of a 'character weakness', he retorts to these ingenues that, as Robert Caro said of LBJ, power revealed the true nature of a politician rather than (per Lord Acton) corrupted it. Yet both views – the illusion that Bland dismisses and the revelation he proposes – make the same mistake of putting too much emphasis on the character of an individual, divorced from the economic and political forces governing his range of action. The effect is to over-individualize and culturalize the historical issues at stake. Or in other words: that's just how Jokowi is, and that's the person that the majority of Indonesians chose as their president. Realism, in this view, can never be critical.

But to use the optic of Jokowi's 'nature' to tell the story of Indonesia makes little sense. Bland seems to think that the main problem with Indonesia, as personified by Jokowi, is a belief that democracy is a tool for development, a 'means of delivering social and economic benefits' rather than 'upholding rights and civil liberties'. Expressing his discomfort with such an 'illiberal view of politics', he nevertheless urges his readers that 'it is better to acknowledge this complex reality than to harbour unrealistic expectations of democratic transformation, or unfounded fears of a full return to authoritarian rule'. Yet Man of Contradictions makes little effort to explore the complexities it invokes. It fails to engage with arguments situating this 'illiberal turn' in its historical setting, with deepening inequalities feeding increasing competition, patronage networks and predatory or transactional practices (see, for example, the recent discussion by Rachael Diprose, Dave McRae and Vedi Hadiz, 'Two Decades of Reformasi in Indonesia: Its Illiberal Turn', in the Journal of Contemporary Asia). Nor does it consider David Bourchier's careful research in Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia (2016) into the ideology of the 'family state' which brooks no opposition, perfected under Suharto. Bourchier also explores the extent to which failure since Suharto to contain corruption, inequality, violence and religious intolerance has bred longings to re-embrace not only more authoritarian styles of rule, but also figures and institutions from the past. This careful historicization is alien to Bland's mode of soi-disant realism about Indonesia's apparently unchanging 'nature'.

The use of Jokowi's personality and life story as a passe-partout to the country neglects not only its socio-economic sores, but the increasing use of military, legal and security forces to suppress dissent and entrench oligarchic power and corruption. Bland is critical of the swelling role of the military, but has less to say about that of the police. Yet along with the praetorian guard of top military brass in his inner circle – generals like Luhut, Prabowo, Wiranto, Moeldoko, all with infamous records of savagery – Jokowi has also not only appointed former National Police chief Tito Karnavian as Minister of the Interior, but an unprecedented number of police generals to senior civilian positions in government, state-owned enterprises and independent state agencies such as the anti-corruption watchdog KPK, despite their lack of qualification for these roles. In July 2020, Jokowi issued a Presidential Decree ordering the intelligence agency, BIN, to report directly to him rather than to the Security Minister. The result of all this has been a predictable rise in state-sponsored intimidation and attacks on government critics.

Online, regime initiatives include taking down, hacking and doxing social-media and messaging accounts. In one well-known case, the WhatsApp account of researcher and activist Ravio Patra was taken over and used to spread inflammatory messages, which then became the pretext for his arrest and confiscation of his devices. Since 2019, such instances have become increasingly common. Groups like Indonesian Corruption Watch and WatchDoc have had their social-media and WhatsApp accounts hacked, while news outlets like Tempo and Tirto.id have had their websites attacked and articles removed. An online regulation was rolled out in 2020 requiring social-media companies to comply in taking down content deemed 'Prohibited by the Government'. There has also been a stepped-up deployment of bots and mercenary influencers, or 'buzzers' – 'buzzeRp', as activists call them – to create counter-narratives, manipulating news and opinions to favour the regime. From late 2019, as protests grew against Jokowi's omnibus 'Job Creation Bill' – a raft of reactionary legislation rammed through in the dog days of the parliament – social organizations and influencers were enjoined by the police and intelligence services to support the Bill, and 'cyber patrols' were deployed to monitor and deter protestors. Universities and schools were warned not to let their students and staff get involved. Similar directives went to the business sector.

The longer Jokowi serves in office, the more apparent becomes the dire combination of decades of economic malaise and his option to shortcut his lack of any coherent strategy, amidst pandemic and recession, with expanded and securitized executive power. While many states have mobilized their armed forces to cope with Covid-19, Jokowi has treated the public-health crisis and accompanying socio-political problems as security questions, interfering with his fixation on economic development. Military and intelligence agencies have even been given a warrant to produce clinical tests and remedies for infection, despite their lack of medical qualifications. Meanwhile regulations widening the duties of the security forces, to 'increase discipline and national productivity', continue to pour out.

Nowhere has this escalation of repression played out more lethally than in Papua. There, the policy of every Indonesian regime has remained the same: to co-opt, divide, dilute or crush resistance and call it 'development'. Despite frequent visits by Jokowi to Papua, and early gestures in freeing some political prisoners and foreign journalists, there has been no fundamental change in Jakarta's treatment of its possession, where security forces have often defied instructions from the capital. For all his professions of good will, Jokowi remains reluctant to engage in any meaningful dialogue about Indonesia's long history of repression and systematic violence in the island, perhaps believing with typical myopic obstinacy that all this will vanish of itself once infrastructure and welfare are improved, similar to his approach elsewhere. The fruits of continual stalling and evasion of political dialogue are plain: rates of homicide and the general level of violence, especially around the Freeport area, are higher than anywhere else in Indonesia. When protests erupted in Papua after right-wing vigilante and police attacks on Papuan students in Surabaya in August 2019, thousands of security personnel and unaccountable militia thugs were unleashed in the dependency, the internet was shut down, schools were closed and at least 37 were killed. This year, as conflict intensified with the assassination of a top Indonesian intelligence official, Jokowi designated the armed Papuan independence movement TPNPB-OPM a 'terrorist' organization and ordered a blanket crackdown, cutting off internet services in the capital on the pretext of damage to the submarine cable.

In effect, rather than taming 'the octopus of oligarchy', Jokowi has embedded himself ever more deeply in the tangled web of traditional military and security apparatuses, elite manoeuvres and transactional politics. Bland writes that it was never Jokowi's intention to reinstate the structures and practice of Suharto's New Order; he simply reached for whatever practical levers of power could help him achieve his 'overriding obsessions': the economy, infrastructure, his personal bank of political capital. Today, sensing perhaps that he cannot hope to fulfil his mission by the end of his second term, he has started to replicate the dynastic traditions of Javanese politics by bringing his kith and kin into positions of power, as trampolines for further ascent. His supporters are already exploring the possibility of extending his term beyond its constitutional limits. Bland bookends Man of Contradictions with quotations from Benedict Anderson's argument that the Javanese tradition of political thought gives priority to the accumulation, not the use, of power. But in the end, what is all this piled-up political capital for? Where, in the words of Bland's aspirational subtitle, is the struggle to remake Indonesia?

Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the struggle to remake Indonesia
Penguin Australia: Melbourne 2020175 pp, 978 1 7608 9724 6

Source: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii130/articles/rohana-kuddus-explaining-jokow