Prabowo Subianto may have intended it to be just an ice-breaker, but he waded right into a hot button political topic for his hosts with his declaration that a DNA test had shown him to have traces of “Indian ancestry”. In doing so, he also showed a mirror to India.
Predictably, Indian media was bowled over. Subianto’s claim of Indian DNA grabbed the headlines along with his remark that his Indian ancestry was evident whenever he heard a Bollywood tune and broke out in a dance.
Prime Minister Modi added his own interpretation for a domestic political constituency by telling an audience in Odisha that the “president of Indonesia said that Odisha is in his blood”. And UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath is now baiting Indian Muslims with Subianto’s remarks, asking them to follow his example and declare “that Lord Ram is their ancestor”.
But the point about Subianto’s “Indian” ancestry is exactly the opposite of what the Hindutva brigade is trying to portray. It is now well-known that all Indonesians are descended from migrants to the archipelago. There is no such thing as a pure Indonesian. The majority of the people follow a “foreign” religion that was the second last to arrive, just ahead of Christianity. The Indonesian president is from Java, where Hindu kingdoms held sway for about 10 centuries from the third century onwards. What is remarkable about his statement is that even though he uses the Muslim card in his own politics, Subianto is quite comfortable with his migrant ancestry.
Contrast this with India, where large sections of Hindutva Indians are “migration denialists” as the writer Tony Joseph, the author of Early Indians, calls them. The rise of Hindutva has been accompanied by a reluctance to accept that every Indian has descended from migrants.
Today India spends considerable amounts of taxpayers' money into proving the “Indic” origins of Indians, by trying to establish against all scientific evidence that the Vedic period began in the time of the Harappans. The futile search for the river Saraswati is just one example. And Prime Minister Modi never tires of saying that he is working to restore India’s “golden age” that ended with the arrival of Muslims invaders a thousand years ago, which he calls a “dark chapter” that ended in 2014. This has seen the rise of a toxic Hindu nationalism that has sought to demean Muslims and Christians as foreigners and lesser citizens.
What is remarkable about his statement is that even though he uses the Muslim card in his own politics, Subianto is quite comfortable with his migrant ancestry. Contrast this with India, where large sections of Hindutva Indians are “migration denialists” as the writer Tony Joseph, the author of Early Indians, calls them.
Indonesia, the fourth most populous country with the world’s largest Muslim population, has followed a different pathway towards forging a national identity. With one small quip, Subianto demonstrated the difference between his country and India. His quirky declaration made no ripples back home, in part because in Indonesian politics, ethnic Chinese are the main outsiders, not Indians, and in part because of Indonesia's mastery of a unique life skill.
A principle for even Asia’s worst dictator
Academics call it “cultural competence”.
Simply put, it means the ability to co-exist in a national mosaic of cultures in a way that goes far beyond “tolerance”, navigating their daily lives mindful of each other’s practices, even absorbing some of those practices in their lives. Cultural competence is a national trait, not just for minorities to find accommodation in a Muslim majority country. Syncretism is commonplace. It is what has prevented radical Islam from growing despite some inroads.
Suharto, Asia’s worst dictator and a Cold War warrior who unleashed an era of state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic Chinese in a proxy geopolitical battle against Communist China, was born Muslim. His practice of Islam was mixed with several Javanese traditions. In line with founding father Sukarno's Pancasila – five principles that serve as Indonesia’s foundation – he banned political Islam. The first sila is that the state would have no official religion and citizens have to state their belief in the “one and almighty god”. It was an indirect way of saying that no religion would be above any other, while recognising Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Confucianism as well as several other local practices. The religion of 93 percent of the population continued to flourish alongside the others.
While India is straining to turn its back on secularism, Indonesia is today known as a country that has made its “multiculturalism” a talking point.
True, it is not perfect
The Indonesian journey has not been easy and it remains a work in progress, on what is once again becoming treacherous ground.
In the post-Suharto period, as Indonesia transitioned into a democratic country, the ban on Islamic political parties was lifted. The winds of Wahabist radicalism and conservatism were blowing over Islam globally, and Indonesia was no exception. Suddenly politicians had to demonstrate their Muslim credentials. Thus, during the 2014 presidential elections, Joko Widodo, who was contesting for the first time, flew to Mecca in a show of piety to fight back rumours that he was a Christian of Chinese origin. Aceh, on the country’s western most tip, is under Sharia law. (While Indonesia remains a unitary state, in the last 20 years, its concessions to the provinces probably make it the world's most decentralised state)
Though the words “pribumi” (the purported original inhabitants of the land) and “pendatang” (immigrants) were banned during the democratic transition after an-anti pendatang conflagration against ethnic Chinese in the dying days of the Suharto regime, and citizenship laws have also been amended to erase such classification, the differences remain. In 2017, an ethnic Chinese-Catholic candidate lost the race to become mayor of Jakarta after a campaign against him by Islamic groups.
Subianto is not known as a democrat. As a former army man who served under Suharto – he is also Suharto’s ex-son-in-law – Subianto is accused of several human rights violations, including killings and for his role in instigating the anti-Chinese violence in 1998. He won the presidency in his third attempt only with the active support of Jokowi, whose son was his running mate and is now vice-president. Despite previous links to Islamist groups, which he leveraged in two previous presidential bids in 2014 and 2019, Subianto has been projecting a more moderate, inclusive image of late, and he may yet refrain from giving in to the demand of some of these groups that Islam should be adopted as the state religion.
But irrespective of the ifs and buts that surround the Subianto presidency, the question that has inadvertently come up from his remark about having Indian DNA is not for India’s Muslims, as Yogi claims. Indian Muslims have never denied their Indian DNA. The question is really for Hindus – can they co-exist with minority communities with the same cultural competence as the majority community in Indonesia?
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