The Thinker: Reclaiming Pancasila

This article was published in Jakarta Post, June 30, 2009

Last month I was invited to attend a meeting in Tegal, not far from Mount Slamet in Central Java. The occasion had me curious, as it was a celebration of Pancasila Day by hundreds of “kelompok penghayat kepercayaan,” or people who still practice their local or traditional beliefs.

For me, the invitation was an unexpected opportunity to journey back in time. I grew up in Tegal and the struggle of people wanting to practice their traditional beliefs had become a recent focus of mine. But Pancasila? Who still wanted to talk about the state ideology?

The word itself still carries the stigma of having been part of Suharto’s authoritarian regime. During that period, Pancasila was used — cleverly and successfully — by Suharto as a powerful ideological weapon to silence those who opposed him.

But now, a decade after the New Order was replaced by “reformasi,” there is an urgent need to take a fresh look at Pancasila. This, in part, has been prompted by the intercommunal and interreligious tension and conflicts that have surfaced since 1999.

Pancasila, first introduced by Sukarno in 1945, when he proposed the five guiding principles that would form the basis of the new state, was viewed as the best possible reference point in managing the multicultural society that is Indonesia. Pancasila was like a gentlemen’s agreement to make the state of Indonesia a state for everyone, without consideration of ethnicity or religion. Under its guiding principles, differences were accepted and acknowledged, but always within the process of finding and strengthening the unity of this multicultural nation.

Concerning the relationship between the state and religion, Pancasila offered neither radical secularization nor complete subordination to religion, but a middle course, a critical partnership between religious institutions and the state. Such an ideal, of course, requires a delicate balancing act and the Suharto experience proved what a difficult act it is.

But however painful those experiences under the New Order were, the social tension and conflicts of the last decade, which touched the deepest chords of our nation, made clear the need to revisit and reclaim the idea of Pancasila. It was in Tegal that I again felt the vitality of the discourse surrounding the ideology.

First of all, even though the event was attended by almost 700 people from different parts of the country, they managed to organize it by themselves, without any support or funding from the government. It really was a celebration by the people and for the people. They wanted to reclaim Pancasila for themselves — even at a time when the bureaucracy, political parties and intellectuals are reluctant to talk about the ideology.

Second, I believe that this process of reclaiming Pancasila will have greater significance if we consider that for people with traditional beliefs, Pancasila is the only way to assert their identities. Since the beginning of the 1960s, when the Ministry of Religious Affairs formulated its definition of “religion” to counter the burgeoning “mystical sects” at that time, those who maintained their traditional beliefs and practices were considered as “ belum beragama ,” or not yet professing any religion.

A classic study by Jane Monnig Atkinson showed the significance of that term. To be considered as belum beragama meant that you did not profess any of the “officially recognized religions of the state,” which, in the politics of religion, had fundamental consequences for an individual’s civil rights — an officially recognized religion had to be recorded on your identity card.

Reformasi has given those with traditional beliefs a window of opportunity, not only to assert their identities, but also to reclaim their fundamental civil rights. When a law passed in 2006 to regulate the administration of population, a new breakthrough was achieved. Those who still professed and practiced traditional beliefs, that is those “whose religions are not yet recognized by the state,” were permitted to leave the religion column on their ID cards blank.

In Tegal, many people spoke of going to their local administrations and asking them to remove whichever one of the six state-recognized religions had been printed on their ID cards. “We want to tell them that now we are going back to our roots,” an activist from Malang, East Java, told me.

Something is happening in our country that could change the demographic constellation of religion in the future, and Pancasila could play an important role in that process.